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POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN 
DEVELOPMENT 

GEORGE BLUMENTHAL EOUI^DATION 

1907 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LECTURES 



POLITICAL PROBLEMS 

OF 

AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 



BY 



ALBERT SHAW, LL.D. 




THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 

1907 

All rights reserved 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS I 

Two CoBies Received ' 

. JUN 22 190^ I 

^ Cooyriffht Entry 

OLASsW XXc, No. 
^ COPY B. 




COPTEIGHT, 1907, 

By the COLUMBIA UNIVEESITT PKES8. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1907. 



J. S. OusWng & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
Norwood, Mass., U.S. A, 



PREFACE 

The present volume is made up of a series of lectures 
delivered as the opening course upon the new Blumenthal 
Foundation in Columbia University. The lectures are 
printed as they were delivered, with no material changes. 
It would seem desirable to say in this prefatory note that, 
quite regardless of the titles assigned to the separate 
lectures (which here appear as chapters), the work is to 
be taken as a single essay or dissertation. We are only 
at the beginning of the history of a great blended family 
of white men of European stock who have made their 
homes in what was so recently the wilderness of North 
America, and who are working out for themselves a life 
of varied human relationships in their effort toward the 
realization of certain ideals and standards. 

Thus far the history that they have made has been 
that of an initial period of development, and of adaptation 
to the conditions presented by a new country. This 
volume deals with the political phases of that initial period 
of development. It attempts to give some analysis of the 
nature of politics in American life, and of the problems 
of a larger sort which have presented themselves for solu- 
tion through political means. The theme of the book is 
the struggle of the American people to realize national 
unity upon the basis of a homogeneous and well-con- 
ditioned democracy. 

Although the several chapters discuss different phases 
or problems of American political life, the attempt has 



vi PBEFACE 

been not to present particular problems in a technical or 
unrelated fashion, but rather to refer the problem in every 
case to its origin in the struggle for the achievement of 
a great nationality, and to show how the problem relates 
itself to the continuous evolution of our free, democratic 
society. It is in this spirit that the reader will find some 
discussion of the passing problems of sectionalism and 
unity; of immigration, race, and citizenship; of domain 
and the public guardianship of natural resources ; of 
parties and participation in the business of government ; 
of economic policies such as those relating to railroads, 
money, and the tariff; and, finally, the questions that 
have arisen in the nation's dealing with other governments 
and peoples. 

Some readers may find in the book a measure of hopeful 
confidence in the character and the future of American 
democracy that current facts might seem to them not to 
warrant. It remains, therefore, only to be said that the 
views expressed are mature and deliberate, whether deal- 
ing with race problems, with economic conditions, or with 
the principles and methods of our practical democratic 

life. 

ALBERT SHAW. 

New York, 1907. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTEE FA0E8 

I. Nature and Mkaning of our Political Life. 

The nature and meaning of politics in American life; 
national unity as the transcendent proVjlem . . 1-29 

n. Problems of Population and Citizenship. 

Constructive problems of population and citizenship, 
with questions of race, language, and status . 30-61 

III. Immigration and Race Questions. 

Further remarks upon immigration and race questions, 
with particular reference to the Southern {jroblem 62-86 

IV. Settlement and Use of the National Domain. 

Problems relating to the settlement and use of the 
national domain 87-115 

V. The Citizen and his Part in Politics. 

Problems of the franchise, practical participation in 
politics, and the working of parties . . . 116-144 

VI. Party Machinery and Democratic Exprksstox. 

Further problems relating to party machinery and the 
freedom of democratic expression . . . 145-165 

VIL Control of Railways and Trusts. 

Problems of economic regulation, especially those re- 
lating to railways and to industrial monopolies 166-193 

VIII. Problems of Tariff and of Money. 

The tariff, questions of taxation, and problems of 
money and currency in our politics . . . 194-223 

IX. Problems of Foreign Policy and Expansion. 

Problems of foreign policy, international relationship, 
and extension of sovereignty .... 224-251 

Index 253 

vii 



POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF 
AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 



THE NATURE AND MEANING OF POLITICS IN AMERICAN LIFE; 
— NATIONAL UNITY AS THE TRANSCENDENT PROBLEM 

It is obvious that there are two standpoints from which 
to make a survey of the poHtical Ufe and problems of a 
nation. The first is that afforded by the formal struc- 
ture and organization of government. It brings into 
focus the official methods through which the political 
interests of the people find expression. This mode of 
approach may be said in a general way to seek answers to 
the question, How we are governed; or, more precisely, 
the question, How we order those phases of our associated 
life which in the broad sense of the word we term political. 

The other standpoint is a very different one, although it 
affords an examination of many of the same facts and 
conditions. This second attitude Ls that of practical poli- 
tics in its scope, its motives, its more definite o?).)ects, 
and its relationships to various social and economic groups, 
and to human activities in general. If the one method 
deals primarily with the legal and constitutional aspects 
of governmental or poUtical life, the other method deals by 



2 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

preference with the functions of government, with the 
content of the poHtical life, with the interests and activi- 
ties which constitute our political society. 

Doubtless it is in keeping with the more usual order of 
presentation to begin with the legal structure and mechan- 
ism of government, and to proceed afterward to a discussion 
of the functions and business, the work and conditions, 
of the political life. But I am to deal with the concrete 
problems that confront us in our associated life as mem- 
bers of the body politic, rather than with government in 
the forms through which it exercises its power. 

Some of these questions lie at the root of the differ- 
ences that give a certain permanence to the dividing hues 
between great parties. There are other questions, belonging 
just as truly and importantly to the political life, that do 
not of necessity present themselves in such a way as to 
coincide with the lines of party cleavage. I shall, indeed, 
bring forward a number of topics and questions of current 
pontics. But it will be in accordance with my purpose to 
treat of them as illustrating the character and course of 
our political hfe and progress in general, rather than to pre- 
sent them as detached questions for detailed and unrelated 
treatment. Tlius if I speak in subsequent pages of the 
tariff or the currency, the race problem or the public con- 
trol of railroads, I shall deal with those matters in their 
broader phases as relating to the political development of 
the people of the United States. 

So vast, indeed, are the considerations which react upon 
the political life in our times, that unless one chooses for 
his theme some specialized topic, he might almost feel him- 
self launched upon a shoreless sea of more or less contro- 
verted ideas, without chart or compass. Let me say then 



NATURE AND MEANING OF OUR POLITICAL LIFE 3 

at the outset that it is directly across this vast and some- 
what turbulent sea that I propose to sail, and I hope it 
may be possible to keep a fairly consistent course. 

It is not only stimulating, but, I think, highly valuable, 
for the student and the man or woman of reflective mind to 
read now and then some great book dealing with the theory 
or the history and policy of states. Aristotle and Plato 
will not, indeed, tell us how to proceed in precise practical 
situations, but we should doubtless go forward more wisely 
with our practical solutions of current problems if our 
politicians and our journalists would but give themselves 
that broadening of mind which the philosophical study of 
politics would help to bring about. It is really necessary 
to drink, sometimes, at the old fountains. What the state 
means, or what it is for, is by no means a settled question. 
It always recurs. In some sense it may be said to consti- 
tute at once the deepest and the most practical of all our 
current political questions. I shall not venture far into 
the metaphysics of the state. Yet, in order to proceed 
with firmness and conviction to the treatment of the 
concrete questions of the day, it is almost indispensable to 
have given some thought — each intelligent citizen for 
himself — to the question what the state, the government, 
the political life, really mean and stand for in our accepted 
scheme of modern civilization. 

Some thinkers and students, from the very nature and 
constitution of their minds, are impelled to find their 
answer to these questions by the use of abstract thinking, 
by philosophy and by logic. Other studeats and thinkers 
advance by preference upon historical lines. They study 
the political history and development of mankind at large, 
and of racial or geographical divisions considered separately. 



4 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

However one proceeds, and whatever theoretical convic- 
tions he may derive from his intellectual processes, he arrives 
at the established fact that he must deal for better or for 
worse with a controlling organization of human society 
known as the state. 

If it suit the quality of his mind to think in generalities, 
as Rousseau and his French contemporaries thought, or as 
our own great doctrinaire Jefferson found it natural to 
think (in such terms and phrases as one finds in the Declara- 
tion of Independence), I can see no serious objection. It 
is quite permissible to arrive by that sort of mental pro- 
cess at one's general conception of the meaning and place 
of the state, or of political government, in relation to 
society. 

Or, if one choose to follow the evolutionary thinking of a 
Bagehot, as expressed in his book called "Physics and 
Politics," or to adopt the historico-political notions of 
writers like Sir Henry Maine or Edward A. Freeman, these 
surely are salutary processes. However accurate such 
writers may be in their finding in the modern state an 
aggregation (and an evolution of the continuous Hfe) of 
ancient village communities, — their mode of study stimu- 
lates the imagination. They help the student to arrive 
at his own mature conception of the modern state and its 
sovereignty, especially in its relation to its federated parts 
and to its subdivisions, down to the primary local units. 

A somewhat different mode of general approach is to be 
found in the classifications of the sociologist, who studies 
mankind in all stages of development and forms of rela- 
tionship, and defines the position and the meaning of politi- 
cal life in the complex organic structure of society. It is 
to be remembered, further, that most of our abstract ideas 



NATURE AND MEANING OF OUR POLITICAL LIFE 5 

and the greater part of our body of accepted conviction 
have come to us down the highway of Christian theology. 
That deep sense of personal right and personal responsibility 
that forms the practical side of the abstract doctrine of 
individualism has grown up through religious association 
and tradition. Thus it is quite possible to argue that the 
elements of modern political society might better be under- 
stood from a study of the history of theology and of the 
church than from a study of the history of Aryan villages 
and Saxon townships. 

Whatever lines of thinking and of inquiry we may follow, 
however, we arrive in this early part of the twentieth cen- 
tury at a point where we find, as a central edifice, a com- 
plicated human structure that we call political. And we 
find a great mass of ideas, convictions, prejudices, interests, 
and forces actively at work in this political edifice, with the 
more or less conscious and definite purpose of obtaining 
results that will make human life happier and better. In 
political philosophy, the accepted doctrines that dominate 
all things are those, first, of individual liberty, and, second, 
of equality of rights and opportunities. Under these doc- 
trines as applied in political life and action, the practical 
question always is, How to secure for the greatest number 
of people the greatest amount of freedom, in ways that do 
not violate the prevailing ideals. 

By every mode of approach, whether philosophical, theo- 
logical, or historical, one arrives at the notions of political 
power and energy. It does not matter for our purposes 
whence this power is derived. Call it, if you will, a sur- 
render by the individual of a part of his theoretical liberty, 
for the sake of a compensating sort of benefit he may derive 
from the negative and positive work of organized society. 



6 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

Or consider, if it seem a better theory, that political power 
begins with an original status of absolutism, from which 
individual freedom is derived by reluctant grants and 
gradual extensions. All the conflicting doctrines have 
their phase of truth. And this may be asserted as re- 
gards the practical political life, quite as truly as in respect 
of the theoretical approach to political doctrine. 

For we are made aware, in a hundred ways, of the abso- 
lutism of the political power that is now over us. . Yet we 
are equally conscious of an exercise of individual freedom, 
by virtue of which we voluntarily submit to new exercises 
of political authority in restraint of our actions. And 
again, we impose our free will, so as to cause the state to 
lift its restraining hand and give us back a former liberty 
to move in other directions. The fact is that we find the 
state a great "going concern." It rests upon innumerable 
compromises, ever in process of readjustment. We shape 
it in so far as we can to an exercise of power in accordance 
with our opinions and supposed interests. On the other 
hand, its great balance wheels revolve with such momentum 
and with such dynamic energy behind them as to equalize 
the minor factors of disturbance. It is thus that the state 
adds the valuable elements of time, method, and steadiness 
to the inevitable process of change. 

In the present-day political structure the foremost fact 
is the state, as represented by the central, or national, 
government. In the political life, as distinguished from 
the structure, on the other hand, the foremost fact is the 
citizen himself. The state is occupied with the great ques- 
tions and policies that concern its external affairs; that is 
to say, its relationship with other states. It is further 
concerned with the ways and means of its own mainte- 



NATURE AND MEANING OF OUR POLITICAL LIFE 7 

nance, and with the problems and policies imposed upon it 
by the conditions of the country over which its sovereignty 
extends. There are great problems that relate to the 
condition and progress of the population as such. There 
are others which have to do with the conserving and de- 
velopment of the existing national domain or with the 
extension of the country's territory. There are questions 
having to do with the intensifying of the functions and 
activities of the state by reason of the growth of population, 
the shifting of population groups and centers, the growth 
of commerce and communication, and the general progress 
in arts of civilized life. 

It is the accepted axiom that the government must be 
conducted in accordance with principles of justice. And 
changing social conditions require almost constant changes 
in the policy and method of government, in order that 
justice may in reality prevail among men in those matters 
where the authority of government must intervene. Again, 
as human society grows more complex, the instrumen- 
talities of government must become more specialized and 
precise ; so that modern government is concerned with the 
perfecting of its own working machinery, as one of its 
greatest tasks. 

Furthermore, government has always to concern itself 
with the delegation or distribution of governing power. 
Modern statecraft has found everywhere that the effective- 
ness of political life requires either a system of federated 
subdivisions like our states, or else a series of departments 
or provinces like those of continental Europe; while for 
purposes still more local in their political and administra- 
tive character there must be further subdivisions, corre- 
sponding to counties, to townships or communes or parishes, 



8 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

and finally to municipal and village organizations for the 
regulation of the affairs of those living close together in 
organic communities. The adjustments of power and the 
distribution of administrative work throughout these ter- 
ritorial and political subdivisions require constant attention, 
and involve frequent change through the creation of new 
conditions or else through mistaken experiments. 

The work of the state in relation to the non-political 
groupings or activities of its citizens must vary from time 
to time in accordance with the changing importance or 
intensity of such activities. In one country or in one 
period, the state may seem to occupy itself above all 
things with a question like the relationship of the political 
society to the freedom or the forms of religious worship ; or 
to the conflicting claims of state and church as regards the 
control of elementary education. Such questions we find 
just now deeply occupying the political life and thought of 
England, France, Italy, Spain, and other countries. Other 
states find themselves perplexed with problems growing 
out of a lack of tribal or racial unity throughout their 
domains ; and their very existence is staked upon the success 
of a public policy and a statesmanship intended to modify 
the clashings of diverse population elements. 

Differences of language or of religion or of historic back- 
ground are accountable for many of those frictions that 
play so large a part in the higher politics of modern states. 
Illustrations will readily occur of themselves. Thus the 
question of the government of Ireland has been among the 
first, if not the very first, of those that have perplexed British 
statesmen for many generations. The bond of language 
IS one that unites bodies of people in such firm groupings 
that it is obviously advantageous when such bodies, of 



NATURE AND MEANING OF OUR POLITICAL LIFE 9 

kindred blood and common tongue, coincide with the higher 
political organization and domain. Where the state in- 
cludes several or many elements, of diverse languages and 
dissimilar ethnic traits, the work of the higher government 
becomes very difficult, and those innumerable concessions 
and compromises that belong to the state as a "going con- 
cern" are in constant process of disturbance, discussion, 
and readjustment. The dual monarchy of Austria-Hun- 
gary furnishes a perpetual example of difficulties of this 
sort, where the present task of statesmanship is to hold the 
discordant parts together by the maintenance of unity in 
a few things at the expense of a harmful diversity in many 
other things. 

Still other states — most of the older ones, in fact — 
have to concern themselves with those changes of political 
and social structure that are demanded in order to give 
outward expression to the modern democratic ideals. This, 
practically, is what politics has meant in several countries 
for a century or more. In England, as throughout Europe 
at large, it has for a long time been one of the principal 
tasks forced upon government to broaden the political 
fabric at its base. The new diffusion of education and the 
gradual breaking down of social caste and economic serf- 
dom have made it necessary to admit more and more 
people to full political franchise. In Russia the process 
is at some such stage now as it had reached in the days of 
King John in England, while in England itself the process 
must go on until the hereditary House of Lords disap- 
pears from the constitutional organization, and the 
church and land systems are reformed to meet demo- 
cratic standards. 

In some countries, the business of the higher statesman- 



10 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

ship is in our times concerned above all else with the regu- 
lation and promotion of the activities of the citizens in 
their economic relationships. Even where the struggle for 
full democratic expression, or for the complete sweeping 
away of surviving feudal privileges, is an ever present and 
dominant fact in the political life, — as in Germany, for 
example, — the state may be found alert and modern in 
its recognition of the progress of the economic life of the 
people, and may attach the utmost seriousness to the func- 
tions of economic oversight and promotion. There are 
some countries where the democratic ideals have been so 
fully realized, in the development of an equally advantaged 
citizenship, that government not only seems to exist chiefly 
for the furthering of the economic interests and well-being 
of the people, but shows a tendency to absorb certain busi- 
ness functions, and to move in the direction of so-called 
socialistic undertakings. 

Examples of such a tendency are afforded by Switzer- 
land, New Zealand, and Australia. Experience shows that 
the seeming existence of a tendency of this sort does not 
necessarily signify the approach of far-reaching or essential 
changes in the business of government. Conservatism is 
always at hand to apply the brake when radicalism moves 
too fast. I think it well to linger for a moment or two upon 
this reflection, since — in the course of the chapters that 
are to follow — I shall of necessity make allusion to a great 
many different topics of concrete political activity. I 
would, then, suggest that we should be very slow to arrive 
at the conclusion that a multiplication of the specialized 
and detailed activities of government indicates a profound 
change in the nature or relative significance of the state. 

The old balance between the power of the state and the 



NATURE AND MEANING OF OUR POLITICAL LIFE 11 

free range of individual action is not shifting in any very 
perceptible manner. There is the constant "give and 
take," as experience points the way. In the stricter regu- 
lation of the national highways of commerce, for example, 
the state adds with one hand far more to individual initia- 
tive and freedom in economic life, than it takes away with 
the other hand. In removing children from factories and 
sending them to school, the state does not necessarily 
exhibit a tendency toward socialistic exercise of power. 
Rather it shows in effect its determination to build up a 
democracy capable of maintaining economic freedom and 
personal initiative. When governmental authority extends 
quarantines, regulates and controls the water supply under 
the test of the bacteriologist, or asserts its power in many 
other new directions, it does not follow that the domain of 
individual freedom is narrowed. On the contrary, indi- 
vidual liberties are enhanced when the family is protected 
against infectious disease, or unwholesome milk, or adulter- 
ated food, just as truly as is the individual freedom enhanced 
through protection against invading armies, against mobs 
and riots, against burglars and highwaymen, or against any 
other sort of danger to life, freedom of movement, and the 
pursuit of one's reasonable ends in life. It is simply that 
old principles require new applications as the conditions of 
life alter in every direction. The practical compromises 
between social authority and private liberty are changing 
in details, rather than in essential bearings. 

Nor would it seem to be true that there is any radical 
change coming about in the partitioning of lawmaking and 
administrative authority between the higher sovereignty 
and the lesser jurisdictions. The greater intensity of 
associated life in all its forms is accompanied by a wider 



12 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

range of political activities. In the very nature of the case, 
what we may call the federative balance will adjust itself 
according to convenience and experience, between the 
central government and the state or local authorities. 
Those matters of large and general interest which can best 
be dealt with by the authority that has widespread juris- 
diction will appropriately devolve upon the central govern- 
ment, while the states and municipalities will hold for 
themselves — or draw to themselves — whatever authority 
they need for the political tasks that they can best per- 
form. 

It is natural that some men should be conservative by 
instinct and suspicious of change. It is always to be ex- 
pected that many will cling to the mere machinery of gov- 
ernment and the established forms of political life, as if 
these were ends in themselves and things sacred like the 
Ark of the Covenant. It is not less natural that there should 
always be others so clear in their perception of social aims 
to be realized through political action, that government 
seems a mere means of getting things done. To such minds 
the established political forms are vexatious obstacles to 
progress whenever they are found standing in the way of 
quick achievement. Such reformers have scant respect 
for the slow processes, and would change the machinery 
every year. But here again one finds the balance shifting 
very little as between the forces of conservatism and those 
of radicalism. By common agreement there must be 
method and order in public action. And thus the radical 
ground of to-day is where the conservatives will surely 
pitch their tents to-morrow; and the desired reform is 
accomplished without strain or danger. 

Meanwhile, then, the state is not changing its essential 



NATURE AND MEANING OF OUR POLITICAL LIFE 13 

character, though it is always extending or modifying the 
range of its activities. There are certain great principles 
or tendencies, like the law of gravitation in the material 
universe, or the law of supply and demand in the economic 
world, that are not losing their validity. The state is not 
likely, under any tendency now perceptible, to absorb the 
nation's capital through confiscatory schemes of taxation. 
Nor does it bid fair to become the universal landlord, nor 
yet the universal employer. On the other hand, I do not 
find any reasonable forecast, based upon existing tendencies, 
that would indicate a virtual breaking down of the su- 
premacy of the state. It will assert itself against the undue 
aggrandizement and power of productive capital in the form 
of corporations and monopolies. In view of attacks from 
the opposite direction, moreover, I can see no prospect of 
the weakening of the authority of the state through the 
spread of the destructive doctrines of the anarchists. The 
state will continue to dominate, supervise, regulate, and 
modify, for the sake of maintaining a reasonable freedom 
of development in the economic life, as in the other asso- 
ciated forms of human activity. 

The state, then, is our highest form of corporate life. 
It authorizes and regulates other forms of association, and 
is, in short, the corporation of corporations, — the clearing- 
house of all normal forms of activity. It sanctions and 
regulates the most important forms of private relation- 
ship, namely, those of the family. It defines and protects 
personal liberty in its various forms. It supports the in- 
stitution of private property, limiting it according to the 
demands of the social welfare. It makes rules under which 
it administers justice. It provides for its own perpetua- 
tion through the training of the young, the encouragement 



14 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

of agriculture and industry, the establishment of whole- 
some conditions, whether physical or moral. It takes care 
that there shall continue to be high standards of national 
life and character. It ministers directly to the advance- 
ment of science and art, and it fosters the exercise of public 
spirit, philanthropy, private thrift and industry, and those 
virtues without the existence of which society decays and 
the state itself must disintegrate. 

The state is therefore much more than a mere association 
of the individuals who make up its citizenship, for coopera- 
tive objects and common ends. Other corporate associa- 
tions are voluntary, and the individual may enter them or 
withdraw from them. He may renounce his church; he 
may leave his employment; he may break away from the 
parental authority which under ancient forms held him in 
patriarchal subjection; he may sacrifice his property. But 
he cannot escape from his subjection to the authority and 
power of the state. Except for those rare cases where the 
individual becomes an outlaw and flees to the ever diminish- 
ing areas in which conditions of wilderness and savagery 
prevail, he is always under the jurisdiction of some govern- 
ment that will hold him amenable to its rules for the 
ordering of life and conduct. 

Evidently it is desirable that the state should have sta- 
bility and that its organs should suit the community over 
which it has jurisdiction. Otherwise the play of political 
forces will be violent; and although the state, imder one 
form or another, will exist and will assert its supremacy, its 
functions will be disarranged, and all the non-political forms 
of social activity will suffer, because the political machinery 
is doing its work badly. It is an aim of statesmanship to 
maintain good external relations so as to secure international 



NATURE AND MEANING OF OUR POLITICAL LIFE 15 

justice and harmony, without incurring the risks of an 
unsuccessful resort to war. It is equally its aim so to 
guide the inner life of the nation as to avoid revolutions 
and extreme political agitations. 

In the healthy political hfe of a nation there will come 
times of very general agreement, when opposition to the 
prevailing order of things is mild rather than intense, and 
when the organs of the state seem, upon the whole, to be 
working admirably. There will be other times when dif- 
ferences of opinion regarding policies and problems are very 
sharp, when parties become almost warlike in their angry 
attitude toward each other, and when political agitation 
seems to have superseded all other forms of expression and 
activity. But with an intelligent citizenship, well trained 
in the honest use of the machinery provided for the ascer- 
tainment of the public will, and accustomed to the accept- 
ance of the rule of the majority, no harm comes to the 
state or to the community from these periods of political 
campaigning. They simply form a part of that necessary 
struggle and discipline through which human society is 
moving, along the path of its destiny, toward a future 
which in our optimistic philosophy we believe will some- 
how be better than the present or the past for society and 
for its individual units. 

I am merely endeavoring to show that it is one of the 
rewards of the well-ordered modern state that its machinery 
of government tends to work with an increasing smoothness 
and strength. The strain of political agitation is better 
endured from time to time. For the citizen, from his 
standpoint, has been making the state a better thing in 
its practical working ; while the state, on its part, has been 
building up a better-trained and a more efficient and trust- 



16 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

worthy citizenship. A great part of the political life con- 
sists in this action and reaction between the citizen and the 
state. It justifies politics as a great national game. The 
citizen must forever be trying to improve the character and 
methods of his government. He must criticize and inves- 
tigate and compare. He must strive, without cessation of 
effort. The state, on the other hand, as a condition of its 
favorable existence, must forever be trying to protect and 
improve the quality of its citizenship. 

Thus the state must face an endless series of questions 
and problems, one after another, that concern the abiding 
welfare of the people. For it is the people in their relations 
to one another, — their relations to the domain they occupy, 
to their families, to their neighbors, to their handicrafts 
or professions, to their social habits, to their intellectual 
convictions, and to their views of conduct, — that make up 
the state in its constituent elements. This may sound 
rather vague or metaphysical, but it is true, and that in a 
most practical way. For the state is not made up of the 
people alone, nor yet of the people plus the domain, but 
rather of the people living in their accustomed relations to 
one another, pursuing their callings, tilling the soil, delving 
in the mine, running the railroad, attending the school, 
debating the problems of life whether from the pulpit, or 
at the lunch hour in the factory, or at the corner saloon in 
the evening. 

Thus the practical problems of politics and of the state 
relate not to the people alone, but to the people in associa- 
tion with their homes, their families, their callings, their 
mountains, their rivers, their railroads, their cities, their 
habits of living, their ways of thinking, — all their manifold 
interests. 



NATURE AND MEANING OF OUR POLITICAL LIFE 17 

Every state, considered in its character as such a com- 
posite entity as I have described, has become what it is 
largely by virtue of its particular history. That is why the 
more thorough students of political development attach so 
much weight to ethnic considerations, and treat physical 
geography with so much respect. The American political 
problems that we have to consider could be understood 
very little if we gave no attention to the racial origins of 
our people, or to the physical and climatic character of the 
great continental domain over which our government 
exercises authority. 

Other nations, as those of Europe, — in that complex re- 
lationship of the people to their domain, their soils, their 
hills, their cities, their pursuits, their habits, their racial 
traditions, — are very much older than our own nation. 
Their national life has deeper root in the things of the past ; 
and we would be very foolish to criticize them contemptu- 
ously because of certain survivals of custom and institution 
that are on their face condemned by the logic of present-day 
democratic politics. If in practice we find church and 
state a difficult thing to manage in the case of Utah, and if 
we find the reform of representation an almost impossible 
thing to manage in Rhode Island, we must not be surprised 
at the difficulties encountered by European states in the 
modernizing of relationships which have been part of the 
web and woof of life for many centuries. 

In a general way we Americans may be said to have 
begun our national life with almost entire exemption from 
a set of political problems that continues to disturb the 
nations of Europe. I refer to those problems of transition 
and readjustment that have followed upon the break- 
ing up of feudal life and medieval conditions. European 



18 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

political structure is full of anomalies. Democracy grows 
into actual power, while retaining monarchy for a visible 
emblem of the state's dignity and authority, as well as of 
its unending continuity. 

However fast or slow the modern political movement 
might have progressed in the Renaissance and the Protes- 
tant Reformation, there could be no question about its 
swift pace when the modern industrial movement set in, 
with the application of steam power to industry and trans- 
portation. The factory system created all our modern 
cities, with the aid of the railroads and the steamships. 
The industrial nations began to develop productive capital, 
the efficiency of labor was multiplied, populations doubled 
and quadrupled. All the forms of new political activity, 
whether in the broadening of the political base and a change 
of the structure of government, or the new direction of 
government activities, followed inevitably in the wake of 
the new economic life based upon that modern combination 
that we call capital and labor. 

The logic of the new economic system meant simply the 
increase of labor efficiency, the abundance and distribu- 
tion of commodities that had once been scarce, the steady 
increase in the average standard of living, the shortening 
of the needful hours of labor, and the gradual bringing 
about of a condition where poverty — which had previ- 
ously been universal, except for the favored few — was 
becoming exceptional, save for the survival of a degener- 
ate element in the slums of a few cities. This new indus- 
trial society was sure to bring about a new political order 
of things. But we in America have not had to undo an old 
order, while entering upon a new one. 

The long unceasing fight for manhood suffrage and general 



NATURE AND MEANING OF OUR POLITICAL LIFE 19 

equality of citizenship that is still going on in European 
countries has not vexed us here, because such minor limita- 
tions as existed in our earlier period were not difficult to 
remove and did not seriously impair the prevailing rule of 
an equal democracy. Our colonies had a common lan- 
guage, and with many diversities of minor organization, 
they had a fairly homogeneous citizenship. They were 
imbued with similar fundamental notions about the rights 
and duties of the individual, the nature of the democratic 
government, — including parliamentary or representative 
institutions, — and the separation of lawmaking, execu- 
tive, and judiciary functions. 

In the theory of international law and in the practice of 
diplomacy, the planet upon which we live is geographically 
partitioned among a series of equal, sovereign, independent 
states. For purposes of intercourse between nations, this 
is a useful -working theory, although it corresponds to the 
real facts only in a limited and superficial way. Small 
states hold their position in the series of sovereignties by 
virtue of the protection of some large state, or through the 
guarantee of a group of states. Other sovereignties, which 
are complete for domestic purposes, are in greater or less 
degree subject in the international sense to the overlord- 
ship of some greater imperial sovereignty. 

Thus the current theory of a series of equal and inde- 
pendent states, which has served a useful purpose for a long 
time past, is one that had its well-known historical begin- 
nings in the rise of modern European nations after the 
break-up of medieval imperialism; and it is a theory that 
may gradually disappear as world relationships take on 
new forms. This observation is quite germane to my 
general theme, because several of our most practical and 



20 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

most controverted problems in current American politics 
are, in point of fact, related to this possibly altered theory 
of sovereignty from the international standpoint. Our 
relations to Cuba, to San Domingo, to Panama, to the 
Philippines, and our attitude toward a variety of questions 
and topics, are affected by changing tendencies in world 
politics and international relations. 

How rapidly, it may be asked, are we moving toward 
a new period of world harmony through the gradually 
strengthening bonds of commercial treaties, postal unions, 
periodic conferences like the one lately held at Rio, special 
conferences like that held at Algeciras, lawgiving assem- 
blages, like the first Hague Congress, and courts for the 
adjustment of differences, like the permanent Hague 
Tribunal? In abstract theory, the citizen yields some of 
his freedom to the community for the sake of the greater 
practical freedom that comes to him from its protection and 
its positive services. In some analogous way, the minor 
sovereignty of state, or province, or dukedom, or prin- 
cipality may be regarded as parting with something of 
its independence and authority, when it enters the larger 
state under which it obtains security and prosperity for its 
non-political interests. Is it not further possible that the 
great states of the present order, — each trailing behind 
it a family of minor states or of colonies and dependen- 
cies, — may agree to yield up a portion of their theoretical 
sovereignty and absolutism to a higher international juris- 
diction, for the sake of peace and harmony, and for the 
safeguarding of those non-political interests of commerce 
and of human brotherhood that hate the risks of war, and 
that find something rather arbitrary and narrow in the 
present conception and practice of nationalism? 



NATURE AND MEANING OF OUR POLITICAL LIFE 21 

However that may be, the process is not to be hurried. 
Limited federation rather than sweeping assimilation is the 
principle that our more recent experience would tend to 
establish. As I have said, we began in our American re- 
public without kings, without great landed aristocracies, 
without powerful ecclesiastical establishments, without in- 
trenched privilege in any form. These are the matters that 
have given other lands a century or two centmies of politi- 
cal problems, of logical division between liberalism and 
conservatism, and of struggles to realize equahty of citi- 
zenship and an even distribution of right and power 
throughout the body politic. 

Our early settlers had been made up largely from those 
advance forces of reform in church and state — chiefly 
in England, but also in other European countries — the 
outworking of whose ideas has largely determined the 
subsequent course of political controversy and develop- 
ment in their original home countries for the past three 
centuries. Even if adherents of the old order had in the 
main made up the early American colonial groups, the 
conditions of life in the new country would perforce have 
modernized their views and made democrats of them. 
But since the American settlers were for the most part 
already in revolt against the old order, with convictions 
so strong that they were willing to sacrifice almost every- 
thing for freedom of thought and action, it was the more 
certain that when the new communities they were creating 
in the wilderness had come together, — and had finally 
swung out into their orbit as a complete and independent 
state in the international sense, — the democratic and 
republican basis of that state should have been secure and 
unquestioned. 



22 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

Thus, to repeat, most of the things which have divided 
parties and been the subject-matter of poHtical life and 
action in modern European countries were matters of 
unanimous agreement with us from the very outset. Our 
larger political life has not, therefore, been so logical or con- 
sistent in its course and progress. The stranger who would 
study our constitutional and political history would not 
find it following the analogies afforded by the history of 
England or of other European countries. 

Our geographical separation from Europe has from the 
beginning strengthened us in our international position. 
Our flag has always floated everywhere as the emblem of 
an unquestioned political entity and sovereignty. And 
our internal contentions and struggles have been far less 
dangerous to our stability than they would have been had 
we lived in contiguity to other powerful states. It so hap- 
pened that the distance of the other great members of our 
world system of sovereignties lessened relatively the cen- 
trifugal forces. Our isolation contributed to the con- 
ditions which in spite of ourselves have kept us from flying 
to pieces. 

The elements that make up a state, as I have said, do 
not consist alone in its people, in its territory, nor in its 
legal instruments and forms. They are to be found in the 
blending of all its interests, material or otherwise. The 
Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, the 
experience of the colonies under the Articles of Confed- 
eration, and, in due course, the adoption of the present 
Constitution of 1787, all played their indispensable part 
in the founding of a great sovereignty. 

But the internal character of our sovereign state, and 
its permanence in the world of states, had yet to be worked 



NATURE AND MEANING OF OUR POLITICAL LIFE 23 

out. This became the central problem of our political life 
until some forty years ago. And while that central problem 
seems now to have been settled for a good while to come, 
many echoes are still heard from the noise and clash of the 
old-time controversy. Thus a number of our discussions 
of current politics can only be understood in the light of 
the great dispute that had to be settled by force upon the 
field of battle. The unity and strength of states require 
such a blending of interests that the considerations which 
hold their parts together are much stronger than the con- 
siderations which would pull them apart. It is neither 
useful nor scientific, therefore, in the study of deep-lying 
political controversies, like our own long contest, to attach 
too great importance to the question which side was right 
and which side was wrong. Statesmanship is a matter of 
compromise and expediency. The difference between right 
and wrong in public policies is not so much a matter of 
abstract ethics as it is a matter of the Gregorian calendar. 
It is not so much what should be done in politics as how to 
do it, and, above all, when to do it. 

Nearly all the differences between conservative groups 
and liberal groups can be referred to that simple question 
of dates. Russia shall have constitutional liberties and 
parliamentary institutions: certainly, every one agrees 
to that. But the disputed question is, when and by what 
process and after what course of preliminaries. Are 
separation and revolution justifiable in given cases, and 
how shall they be avoided? We were facing those ques- 
tions in our practical political life for more than seventy 
years. Now, such questions as separation and revolution 
do not enter into the serious stages of political controversy 
without deep-lying causes. There is usually a strong argu- 



24 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

ment on both sides. There may be lacking a citizenship 
fit for responsible and regulated political life. There may 
be a governmental machinery so ill devised that it is not 
responsive to the needs of the body politic, or elastic in its 
bearing upon the different conditions of the several con- 
stituent parts of the state. Or deep discord may inhere in 
differences of non-political social structure and in the ends 
and aims of organized life. A tariff system might seem 
beneficial to one section and ruinous to another. In a well- 
ordered state the normal play of pohtical life at such a 
period would bring about a change of tariff policy, and a 
gradual equalizing of economic conditions, for the sake of 
the larger interests involved in the maintenance of unity. 
The continuance of our federal union was for more than 
two generations an object of concern so profound that all 
our important domestic and foreign policies had to be 
tested by the question whether the play of party difference 
and controversy would fall within the normal lines of 
ordinary political strife, or whether it would go deeper and 
threaten disruption. New England, through its devotion 
to commercial and seafaring pursuits, protected the slave 
trade in the early day, and plotted secession when the 
second war with England was preceded by embargoes on 
shipping. The presence of so distinct a race as the negroes 
and the existence of so archaic an institution as slavery 
provided us from the very outset with elements of the most 
serious political controversy. The rapid development of 
the slave system in one half of the country, while it was 
excluded from the other half, made a condition fraught 
with ever increasing danger to unity. This difficulty was 
accentuated by the rapid growth in the northern half of 
the country of the modern industrial system, followed by 



NATURE AND MEANING OF OUR POLITICAL LIFE 25 

the creation of manufactuiing cities, the building of rail- 
roads, and the transformation of agricultural into manu- 
facturing states. The early Southern statesmen had hoped 
for a retreat from the slavery system before its numerical 
and economic factors made it unmanageable. The North- 
ern statesmen had tolerated the continuance of the slave 
trade through the pressure of private commercial interests, 
and with little thought of the day of reckoning. 

The invention of the cotton gin gave the agricultural 
South a new and stupendous source of wealth and power, 
strengthened the slave system tenfold, and crystallized 
the Southern attitude against protective tariffs at the very 
moment when Northern economic tendencies made for pro- 
tective duties. National statesmen hke Webster and Clay 
saw the importance of time as an element in political con- 
troversy, and sought compromises which would postpone 
projects of division in order that there might grow up those 
varied and ever blending interests that hold nations together 
in spite of their differences. And this was a rational and 
legitimate course of action. Many a statesman in many a 
country has gone so far as to seek external disputes and to 
risk international war, for the sake of arousing patriotism 
at home and tiding over a threatened period of civil strife 
or territorial division. 

The hair-splitting of the lawyers played its part and had 
its influence upon the national state of mind, so that it may 
be said to have entered really into the controversy. But 
the deeper questions at issue were not those of the dialec- 
ticians or the constitutional lawyers. The arguments for 
and against the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were 
excellent on both sides, and in later years the logic of 
Calhoun was as flawless as the logic of Webster. 



26 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

The deep forces of our political life were working toward 
their own conclusions, while the lawyers were debating the 
nature of the federal compact. There had been thirteen 
original colonies laying claim to the possession of national 
sovereignty; and these thirteen had delegated certain 
powers, by virtue of which they had created a fourteenth 
entity, which alone represented them in external relations, 
and which alone was recognized by the rest of the world as 
having the attributes of sovereignty. As a matter of fact, 
apart from theory, not one of the thirteen had ever really 
stood out in possession of statehood in the higher sense, or 
exercised sovereignty in the presence of the world. They 
were in a condition of evolving nationality, with no outside 
status except their collective one, and with a very imperfect 
adjustment of their internal structure. 

In the Napoleonic epoch and later on, European sovereign- 
ties were frequently lost to sight and then appeared again. 
Germanic confederations and empires have been recrystal- 
lized in various forms of inner and outer sovereignty. It 
is not in the least strange or discreditable, therefore, that 
these straggling minor sovereignties of ours, extending all 
the way from the St. Lawrence River to the Gulf of Mexico, 
should also have been deeply agitated over the possibilities 
of dissolution and regrouping. It could not have been 
otherwise under the circumstances. 

The arguments on both sides were entirely legitimate. 
It belonged to the nationalist or federalist to hold things 
together until the complex blend of advantages in union 
should clearly outweigh the considerations that lay behind 
the motives of separation. There lies no compelling obli- 
gation in paper compacts. Written constitutions of federal 
character have final value only as they are sustained by the 



NATURE AND MEANING OF OUR POLITICAL LIFE 27 

realities that hold the several states or sections together, 
regardless of recent or ancestral documents. 

In our case, then, what was the really determining fac- 
tor that settled not only the questions of argument, but 
also decided in advance the issues of a needless and ill- 
fated war ? The answer is a plain one, and it goes to the 
heart of all our political life. The unity of the nation was 
not evolved out of the arguments or wishes or even the 
war struggles of the thirteen original so-called sovereign- 
ties that had formed the compact. For a new makeweight, 
altogether, had appeared, in the growth of the nation 
beyond the Alleghanies. The chief steps toward union — 
following the events that led up to the constitutional 
arrangement of 1787 — had been, first, the cession of the 
northwestern lands by Virginia and the other colonies to 
the Union as a whole, and, second, the great Louisiana 
Purchase accomplished a little later by Mr. Jefferson. 

These vast domains were unquestionably national, what- 
ever might have been the status of the thirteen colonies. 
And as the new states one by one came into the Union, the 
federal compact became a mere legal theory, — a piece of 
fiction comparable with that in accordance with which the 
king of England is still the source of all authority and 
power. For whatever may be true of the original thirteen, 
it is not true of any of the other states, excepting Texas 
alone, that it was ever sovereign in any sense of the word, 
plenary or limited. These states are territorial divisions 
of a great inseparable national domain, peopled, not by 
Ohioans, or Kentuckians, or Nebraskans, or Californians, 
but by Americans, owing full and undivided allegiance to 
the government of the nation. 

During that very period when the constitutional lawyers 



28 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

were debating the nature of the federal compact, we were 
creating a nation that belonged to itself, that owed noth- 
ing to preexisting local commonwealths, and that found 
no sufficient reason to attach more importance to legal 
fictions than to plain historical truth and to the normal 
forces of political life. If divergence of interests between 
North and South, or between East and West, should in 
some future time become so great that the benefits of 
national union were in the minds of most men outweighed 
by the disadvantages, cleavage might follow and separate 
sovereignties might emerge. But the reasons for such 
division would no longer be referred back to the legal nature 
of the federal compact. 

Our system as now established does not contemplate the 
withdrawal of a state or a group of states by orderly pro- 
cess. The Constitution provides a way for the admission 
of new states, but no way for the expulsion or withdrawal 
of a state once admitted. Thus in om^ newer series of 
political questions — dealing in some of their phases with 
the relations between the state and the nation — the old 
fine-spun arguments about states' rights and national 
sovereignty survive as historical curiosities. The national 
Constitution is subject to amendment as are those of the 
states. The distribution of functions is to be worked out 
from time to time for purposes of convenience in the light 
of experience. With this practical freedom to adjust and 
"to change, nobody is in danger of oppression or harm 
through the aggrandizement of the central government. 
Nor, conversely, is any one in danger from the undue asser- 
tion of state supremacy. 

Political sentiment and political education make for the 
broad and continental view, rather than for the narrow 



NATURE AND MEANING OP OUR POLITICAL LIFE 29 

and parochial view. In matters of wide concern, where 
the federal government has not acquired or exercised au- 
thority, there is a tendency toward voluntary unformity in 
the laws and customs of the several states. The civil and 
penal codes of New York have, with more or less change, 
been transferred to the statute books of many another 
state. Each state is a laboratory of political experimenta- 
tion, and its successful undertakings are widely imitated 
in other states. Thus we find a field for constant discus- 
sion and safe controversy, touching the relative functions 
of state and national government. On the other hand, the 
progressive work of one state will set an example that leads 
to wholesome political controversy within the real though 
limited field of state politics, in the commonwealths that 
are less advanced at certain points, as for example in mat- 
ters of education or taxation or penology, or in methods for 
the protection of the public welfare against the undue 
pressure of private interests. 



II 



CONSTRUCTIVE PROBLEMS OF POPULATION AND CITIZEN- 
SHIP, WITH QUESTIONS OF RACE, LANGUAGE, AND STATUS 

There is a sense in which the molding of an effective 
citizenship, imbued with a sense of pubHc as distinguished 
from private well-being, and capable from time to time of 
fairly harmonious action, is at once the principal task and 
the highest reward of government. There is another sense 
in which the shaping of an efficient mechanism of govern- 
ment is the chief concern of a well-ordered citizenship. 
In practice the processes are not very distinct from each 
other, although to some extent they are separable for 
purposes of discussion. Both processes give rise to groups 
or successions of political problems. 

The visitor from another country finds here a great Eng- 
lish-speaking population of composite European descent. 
Its legal and social structure, its literature, its moral and 
religious ideas, like its prevailing language, are of English 
origin. Modifications have been great in number and deep 
in influence, but the manifest advantages of a common 
language have been great enough thus far to prevail over 
all obstacles ; and language itself has a wonderful power to 
preserve laws, forms, customs, and ideals. 

In our formative period, the nations that were reaching 
out with the instinct for colonization in new countries 
were principally the English, French, Spanish, and Dutch. 

30 



PROBLEMS OF POPULATION AND CITIZENSHIP 31 

They were maritime and commercial nations, and they be- 
came great naval powers in the course of their commercial 
and colonial rivalries. The ultimate character of North 
America as respects race and language could not have been 
predicted until after the middle of the eighteenth century. 
Few people realize how much depends upon the acquisition 
of technical sovereignty over unoccupied territories. 

There are men now living who knew in their childhood 
grandfathers or old neighbors who had survived from the 
period of the French and Indian War, when the entire 
English foothold on this continent lay east of the Appa- 
lachian Mountains, nowhere reaching so far north or west 
as the St. Lawrence River, and extending southward only 
to about the middle of what is now Georgia. It was a coast- 
wise fringe about a hundred miles deep. Florida, the Gulf 
of Mexico, Texas, California, and the great West belonged 
tor Spain. To France belonged not only the territories 
contiguous to the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, 
but the entire country drained by the Mississippi River and 
its tributaries from western Pennsylvania to the Rocky 
Mountains. 

Conditions which had led to American colonization had 
brought to the English settlements a class of people better 
fitted for agricultural and industrial pioneering and the 
making of modern communities than had gone from Spain 
or France to the territories over which they had assumed 
jurisdiction. The Spaniards had in Mexico and farther 
south found a comparatively large Indian population, with 
cities and towns, agricultural development, and wealth in 
gold and silver. From the economic standpoint the 
Spaniards were conquerors and despoilers, while from the 
religious standpoint they were missionaries and church 



32 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

builders. They imposed the Spanish language and church, 
and many Spanish customs, upon the native population. 
But conditions made it difficult to create in Mexico, or 
elsewhere in North America, a Spanish-speaking population 
of European stock and character. 

The French in the province of Quebec showed capacity 
to take root in new soil and to develop communities and 
institutions; and they had begun to show a like capacity 
in their settlements on the extreme lower Mississippi. But 
for the rest of their great domain they were too much 
scattered. As explorers, missionaries to the northern 
Indians, fur traders and trappers along the vast network 
of interior waterways, they were a superb race of pioneers ; 
but their settlements were remote, and their pursuits were 
too precarious for the rapid development of a people. 
Nevertheless, if the war between England and France had 
ended differently, and if the French rather than the Eng- 
lish had won in the decisive battle of Quebec, wc should 
probably have had to deal in North America with a very 
different set of political problems. 

The war that ended in 1763 had carried English juris- 
diction to the Mississippi, and our own war that ended 
twenty years later had substituted the American for the 
English flag. If the earlier war had not been fought, or if 
it had ended differently, it is not probable that the colonies 
would have sought their independence. The French power 
would have increased steadily, as would also the French 
population west of the Alleghanies. New Orleans, St. Louis, 
Detroit, Pittsburg, and various other communities would 
have taken on a permanently French character like Mon- 
treal or Quebec. For our English-speaking people must 
not think that the French could not have developed a great 



PROBLEMS OF POPULATION AND CITIZENSHIP 33 

nation in North America if they had but retained sover- 
eignty over their unoccupied territory for another century. 

It was a series of larger historical events, having their 
chief causes in the rivalries and struggles of Europe, that 
preempted a great domain for the English-speaking colonies 
of the Atlantic seaboard and gave them an opportunity to 
create a powerful and homogeneous nation in the process 
of subduing a wilderness. We acquired our territory west- 
ward to the Mississippi before the French trading posts on 
the rivers and lakes had become important enough to give 
any permanent character to the development of the country. 
In like manner, some twenty years after the close of the 
Revolutionary War, we acquired, through the so-called 
Louisiana Purchase, the great remaining territory of France 
stretching from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, 
and containing few permanent communities except in what 
is now Louisiana proper. Mexico retained Texas and the 
California country for a generation longer, but developed 
it too slowly to give it a permanent Spanish impress; and 
it fell into our hands while it was still for the most part 
an unpeopled and wilderness region. 

If a nation possesses a certain degree of pioneering and 
colonizing energy, its natural instinct is for the acquisition 
of contiguous unoccupied territory. Growth of numbers, 
wealth, and power is an instinctive demand that belongs 
to the sense of nationality, and is bound up with the spirit 
of patriotism. An extension of domain where circum- 
stances permit is one of the most obvious elements of such 
national growth. The acquisition of adjacent undeveloped 
territory by an agricultural nation whose people have the 
pioneering impulse and a natural hunger for land owner- 
ship is a wholly different thing from the extension of 



84 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

sovereignty over established communities. Thus our earlier 
extensions of sovereignty, for the sake of our normal west- 
ward development, involved a set of political problems 
wholly unlike those that would attend our acquisition of 
Cuba, or that would arise in case of a proposal to annex 
the older parts of Canada on the north or the Republic of 
Mexico on the south. 

No state of modern times has had such an opportunity 
for the development of a homogeneous citizenship of high 
character and capacity as fell to the lot of the United States. 
An early perception of this fact became very general, and 
although its expression was often boastful and exagger- 
ated, it was of itself an important element in the growth 
of the nation. Never was there a nation so convinced of 
its own high destiny, so sure of the peculiar favor of Provi- 
dence, or so sincerely sorry for the inferior lot of people 
born in other lands and living under other jurisdictions. 
This superb confidence had much to do with differentiat- 
ing the American people from other peoples. It helped 
them to surmount the difhculties that lay in the way of 
their progress, and it gave them power to assimilate new 
ingredients of population. 

It would be a mistake to regard their favorable opinion 
of their own political and social advantages as a seriously 
erroneous one. The American communities in our Revo- 
lutionary period were the most advanced in average condi- 
tion of any in the world. There was a higher diffusion of 
intelligence and a more even distribution of property than 
in any of the European countries. Here was to be wit- 
nessed the one great democratic experiment of the modern 
world. And the chief solicitude of American govern- 
ment and statesmanship was for the preservation of those 



PROBLEMS OF POPULATION AND CITIZENSHIP 35 

conditions and ideals, which were so distinctive that they 
gave our people a certain consciousness of high example 
and the sense of a mission to inspire liberal and democratic 
tendencies in European countries against effete institu- 
tions. 

So real and so powerful were these sentiments in our early 
period, and with such good reason when viewed in the light 
of historical facts and contrasts, that it is by no means 
strange that they should have done constant service in our 
own political controversies. Practical democracy became 
doctrinaire and exacting. It was suspicious of any sort 
of restriction or limitation. It preferred a somewhat 
riotous individual freedom to a restraint that might savor 
too much of centralized authority and power. 

In New England the town meeting and the small democ- 
racy of the self-governing neighborhood had created a 
remarkably efficient and well-trained citizenship. The 
Southern county system had not developed the private 
citizen so highly, but it had produced in every county a 
very considerable number of men capable of leadership and 
of administrative work. After the Revolution the west- 
ward movement advanced with great energy and rapidity. 
The new lands were subdivided and sold with conscious 
reference to their settlement and ownership by small 
farmers, — not for acquisition and retention in the form of 
large estates. The land system intentionally facilitated 
the subsequent formation of local governments in town- 
ships and counties, of convenient size and general regu- 
larity. The support of schools was provided for by the 
designation for school purposes of certain lands in each 
new township. 

As the process of settlement went on, Territorial 



36 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OP AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

governments were established, through which all the 
rudiments of local political life were planted and nurtured 
under national authority and oversight. Thus when the 
new communities had attained sufficient growth and sta- 
bility to be admitted as states in the Union, they were 
already in possession of the same laws and customs and 
local institutions of self-government as had grown up in the 
older states from which they had migrated, but reduced 
to a more regular and typical form. In the local institu- 
tions of the newer states there had been worked out certain 
types that blended and combined the somewhat varying 
systems of the original seaboard colonies. In the structure 
and government of the Western townships and counties 
there was a combination of the characteristics of the New 
England towns and the Virginia counties. 

And while there was a certain tendency to migrate west- 
ward on parallel lines, each of the newer states received 
population accessions from a number of the older ones, with 
the result that the westward movement added constantly 
to the solidarity of the people, and intensified whatever 
was distinctive in their traits as Americans and what- 
ever was typical in their institutions. It is always to be 
borne in mind that this process of growth and development 
across the continent was not by methods that were random 
or accidental, — or even natural, in the sense of being 
unrestrained. It was, upon the whole, a process of an 
ordered sort, guided by a national policy that was concern- 
ing itself as regards the permanent character of American 
citizenship. The thing aimed at was fitness to maintain 
through future generations the democratic political life of 
the country whether local or national. 

This process of creating a continental people, demo- 



PROBLEMS OF POPULATION AND CITIZENSHIP 37 

cratic in spirit and republican in political forms, has been 
one of the great positive aims of government in the United 
States, and many practical questions and problems have 
from time to time arisen in association with it. Economic 
and social conditions in the early period of the country were 
favorable to large families, and the westward movement 
was strong and irresistible. Since the church, the school, 
and the local organization of government were promptly 
estabhshed as each new county or township of the public 
domain was surveyed and opened to settlement, the free- 
dom and private initiative of frontier life were tempered 
by the presence of familiar institutions. 

The process was so rapid that the country had been set- 
tled from one ocean to the other long before the pioneers 
had lost the immediate sense of kindred with those who 
had remained in the older states. Nothing like this, so 
far as we know, has ever happened in the history of 
any other land. Not only is it to be said in a general way 
that the early stock of New England or Pennsylvania, of 
Virginia or North Carolina, spread westward, forming new 
communities across a continent, but the movement is to 
be illustrated in a much more striking way by the migra- 
tion and spread of particular families. Elsewhere and in 
other times family clans and patriarchal groups have held 
together within limited areas. But in this country, as 
many a genealogical compilation will show, the families 
have spread straight across the country, increasing and 
multiplying under favorable conditions afforded by new 
soils and ample room, until a great nation has been formed 
within three or four generations, essentially based upon 
this spread of interrelated families. 

Although, as I have said, this movement to new lands was 



38 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

mainly upon east and west lines, there was in Ohio, Indiana, 
and Illinois a blending of the settlers from New England, 
the Middle States, Virginia, and the Carolinas. But with 
the growth of slavery and its new economic importance, 
the fear and danger of disunion led to various political 
compromises, among which was the understanding that 
some of the new states should be slave territory and others 
should be free. Missouri had been admitted in 1821 as 
a slave state. By all natm'al conditions of soil and cli- 
mate and tendency of population, it should have been a 
free state like Illinois. Texas came into the Union in 1845 
by a different method, with slavery already existing as a 
domestic institution. 

In the states north of the Ohio River, formed from the 
lands ceded by the northern and middle colonies and Vir- 
ginia, the Ordinance of 1787 declared that slavery should 
never exist. It provided for the equal division of estates 
among children in the descent of property, with a view to 
the building up of democratic communities, based upon 
landowner ship. One of the chief purposes of the Ordinance 
was declared to be the "extending of the fundamental 
principles of civil and religious liberty, which form the basis 
whereon these republics, their laws and constitutions, are 
erected; to fix and establish those principles as the basis 
of all laws, constitutions, and governments, which forever 
hereafter shall be formed in the said territory." 

Elsewhere in the Ordinance it is declared, "Religion, 
morality, and knowledge being necessary to good govern- 
ment and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means 
of education shall forever be encouraged." According to 
the terms of the Ordinance, the territory was later divided 
into the five states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and 



PROBLEMS OF POPULATION AND CITIZENSHIP 39 

Wisconsin. It established principles both positive and 
negative which were intended to build up states upon the 
ideals of equality, freedom, private property, and demo- 
cratic government. Some especial considerations were 
extended to the existing French communities, but these were 
small, and it was perfectly understood that the new states 
would become the home of English-speaking Americans, 
who would generalize, so to speak, the peculiarities of the 
Eastern colonies and produce the national type. 

Such statesmanlike forethought was amply rewarded. 
For the settlement of those states of the old Northwest 
Territory under the conditions prescribed was of incompar- 
able importance in the creation of that body of citizenship 
which has rendered the nation one and indivisible, as a 
matter of underlying fact, regardless of legal theories. 

Three years later, the principles of the Ordinance of 1787 
were applied to the territory south of the Ohio River, 
Virginia having ceded to the Union what is now Kentucky, 
and North Carolina having made a similar grant of what is 
now Tennessee. In 1798 there was organized under act of 
Congress what was called the Mississippi Territory, Georgia 
having ceded to the United States its rights and claims over 
the lands which now comprise the states of Mississippi and 
Alabama. With the sole exception of the clause forever 
prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude, the Ordi- 
nance of 1787, providing for the government of the Ohio 
country, was extended to the Mississippi Territory as it 
had been to Kentucky and Tennessee. This Ordinance had 
declared among other things that "the said territory and 
the states which may be formed therein shall forever re- 
main a part of this confederacy of the United States of 
America." 



40 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

One of the striking declarations of that great Ordinance 
reads as follows : — 

" The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards 
the Indians ; their lands and properties shall never be taken 
from them without their consent; and in their property, 
rights, and liberty, they never shall be invaded or disturbed, 
unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress; but 
laws founded in justice and humanity shall from time to 
time be made for preventing wrongs being done to them 
and for preserving peace and friendship with them." 

Thus the things chiefly characteristic of the institutions 
and people of the great series of states west of the Appa- 
lachian Mountains and east of the Mississippi River were 
described in the Ordinance of 1787. These states were to 
belong forever to an American nationality that was to rest 
upon high principles of character and intelligence. What 
I wish to emphasize is the fact that the essentials of their 
political structure and social life were carefully provided 
in advance and laid down for them through the collective 
wisdom and the best judgment and experience of the United 
States. It was the intention of Congress to create a homo- 
geneous citizenship, with a similarity of local and general 
institutions, in all the states to be formed out of the national 
domain. Citizenship was conceived of as belonging to a like- 
conditioned body of free white men. 

It was clearly perceived that great and serious practical 
difficulties were to be encountered through the existence 
of two alien races — Indians and Negroes — which could 
not be absorbed or assimilated. North of the Ohio it was 
feasible to exclude slavery. South of the Ohio such ex- 
clusion could not be agreed upon, audit was left for the 
states in the future to deal with it as a domestic problem. 



PROBLEMS OF POPULATION AND CITIZENSHIP 41 

It was generally expected at that time that the new states 
south of the Ohio would be built up by farmers cultivating 
their own lands, and the subsequent importance of the' 
slavery question from the economic and from the political 
standpoints was foreseen only dimly if at all. 

The Indian question, on the other hand, was everywhere, 
west of the Appalachians, a serious and difficult one. How- 
ever great at times may have been the practical injustice 
of our treatment of particular Indian tribes, it is to be 
remembered that it has been the intention of the govern- 
ment and of the people as a whole to act fairly toward the 
natives of the country. The tribes with which we had to 
deal were without agriculture except of the most limited 
sort, were nomadic in their habits, and held their lands only 
in the sense of having a prescriptive right to roam over them 
in their pursuit of wild animals. These Indians were few 
in numbers, and as our forefathers needed lands for orderly 
settlement, it was necessary for the general government to 
extinguish the Indian title by some form of agreement with 
tribal chieftains, based on the analogy of international 
treaties. 

The process has been a long and continuing one, and it 
would be both interesting and instructive to trace the effect 
of our contacts and relationships with the Indian as affect- 
ing the development of what is most distinctive in American 
citizenship and character. Certain Indian traits and 
qualities — those of physical courage and endurance, of 
silence and stoicism under conditions of danger and diffi- 
culty, of a certain unassailable personal dignity — have 
for a hundred years unquestionably so affected the Ameri- 
can mind as to have entered very deeply into the quality 
of what we may call American personality. If all our 



42 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

pioneers were not at some time engaged in Indian fighting, 
they were all schooled in the need of being prepared for it. 
Outside of our Eastern cities, every American boy until 
within a very recent period has been trained in the use of 
arms, has had some knowledge of wild animals and wood- 
craft, and has imbibed something of that personal initiative, 
resourcefulness, and capacity for self-directed action that 
could not have come alone from our early provisions for 
democratic equality and universal education. It came in 
large part from the experience of subduing a great continent 
and from the actual or traditional dealings of our people 
with so remarkable a man as the American Indian. 

The obtaining of Indian lands, the carrying on of Indian 
wars, the relocating of Indians on substituted lands farther 
west, the dealing with them on reservations, the attempts 
to educate them and to fit them for modern economic life, 
and the constant efforts of philanthropists and idealists 
to give practical effect to our national pledges of justice 
toward the Indians, have provided us with a series of prob- 
lems of government and administration from which we have 
never at any time been wholly free. 

In Mexico the Indians were never supplanted, but en- 
tered into the body of citizenship. The result must be a 
slow and uncertain experiment in the creation of a new 
nationality of mixed racial origin, with the Spanish lan- 
guage as one of its chief uniting bonds. One-fifth of the 
Mexican population is white, with some small infusion of 
Indian blood. Two-fifths is of thoroughly mixed racial 
character, and about two-fifths almost purely Indian. 
The Indian racial type is evidently destined to prevail in 
Mexico, and the process of race amalgamation will go 
steadily forward. It will be a slow and difficult task, but 



PROBLEMS OF POPULATION AND CITIZENSHIP 43 

not an impossible one, to bring this Mexican population 
up to a much higher average standard of intelligence and 
efficiency than now prevails. 

Our methods of agricultural settlement and advance 
almost wholly precluded intermarriage. Our conditions 
were incomparably more favorable than those of the Span- 
iards in Mexico. We were dealing with a small number 
of Indians, relatively speaking, and these were of nomadic 
and savage character, in contrast with the fixed nature of 
the Indian population of Mexico. The French, on the con- 
trary, as hunters and trappers among the Canadian Indians 
of the Northwest, took Indian wives, with the result that 
there arose a considerable population of French-Indian 
half-breeds. Here again the number of Indians is small 
when compared with the rapid development of the white 
race, and Canada's Indian problem will be solved by the 
complete absorption of the Indian population into the com- 
posite European stock that is building up the Western 
Canadian provinces. 

By original agreement in accepting the cession of the 
Mississippi Territory from Georgia, the United States gov- 
ernment had promised to extinguish the Indian land titles 
and make other provision for the Southern red tribes. Out 
of such agreements there resulted the subsequent creation 
of the so-called "Indian Territory," whither, from time to 
time, were removed the Choctaws, Creeks, Seminoles, and 
many other entire or fractional tribes. These Indians 
have been fortunately situated and well protected in their 
rights, and they have adopted so many white men into their 
tribal organizations that the full-blooded Indians are now 
in a small minority. A gradual opening up of these 
Indian lands to white settlement resulted some years ago 



44 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

in the setting apart of the temporary territory of Okla- 
homa. We have just now witnessed the reunion of Okla- 
homa and what was left of the old Indian Territory, and 
the admission of the whole under the name of Oklahoma 
as a state in the Union. 

The process has been marked by great care, in the dis- 
tribution of lands in severalty to Indian families and in- 
dividuals, and by various provisions to protect the Indians 
in all their rights of person and property during a future 
transitional period. All these red men of the Indian Ter- 
ritory will enter into full American citizenship, and the pro- 
cess of absorption into the white race will go on through 
intermarriage without fm'ther hindrance or difficulty. 

Gradually through long experience we are learning how 
to deal more intelligently with the Indians now segregated 
in Western reservations. The government's policy of 
providing schools for the Indian children is constantly 
growing wiser in its practical methods, and although the 
aboriginal instincts are stubborn and hard to overcome, 
the inexorable pressure of our white population will either 
absorb the red man or cause his numbers to dwindle toward 
the point of extinction. As a subject requiring great care 
and intelligence in administration, the Indian question 
will remain with us for a long time. But as a question 
affecting population and citizenship, it has now practically 
disappeared. We shall always owe some traits and quali- 
ties of national character to our contact with the North 
American Indians, but we shall assimilate them as a race 
with results scarcely perceptible. 

And when we set this fact in contrast with the actual 
racial conditions under which the Republic of Mexico is 
struggling, we shall better be able to see how tremendous 



PROBLEMS OF POPULATION AND CITIZENSHIP 45 

an element in the development of a new country, from the 
standpoint of its social and political problems, is that of 
a general unity of race and stock founded upon a high 
average of intelligence and character and of capacity for 
citizenship. Thus, although it was no part of the original 
American theory or forecast that the Indians should come 
into our citizenship, the process of race absorption is dis- 
posing of them, or will ultimately so dispose of them, as an 
alien factor giving rise to political difficulties. 

The other original race problem, that of the Negroes in 
the United States, has pursued a very different course and 
remains with us to-day as in many aspects the most diffi- 
cult matter with which we have now and in the future to 
deal. In the Northern as well as in the Southern colonies 
there existed a more or less distinct social aristocracy 
founded upon ancestral superiority in England, or else upon 
large holdings of land, or finally, upon educational or pro- 
fessional or political preferment. Such distinctions were 
not sharply drawn, and they were supported by no special 
privileges or advantages after our American political sys- 
tem had become fairly developed. American fundamental 
policy was indeed a leveling policy, but it sought to estab- 
lish a very high level. It did not presuppose uniformity 
of results when it established, so far as laws and institu- 
tions went, equality of opportunity. 

What it did, however, presuppose was a very high degree 
of social mobility. It meant that the landless man should 
easily become a landholder by the simple process of joining 
the pioneers and moving westward. It meant that the 
apprentice in any trade could easily become a journeyman, 
and that the journeyman should readily become an em- 
ployer. It meant that the aspiring boy, however humble 



46 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

his parentage, should have such an educational start that 
he might easily work his way into the learned professions. 
It meant that the private citizen should in his own local 
community have such frequent occasion to take part in 
public affairs that he might readily advance in accordance 
with his aptitudes and character to the higher places in 
state and national public Ufe. 

One of the chief concerns of the American state, in the 
large sense of that word, has been to preserve this social and 
political mobility and to prevent the crystallizing of our 
population into castes or classes by any process whatso- 
ever. The public schools, which have, upon the whole, 
been our most uniform and vital institution, in this process 
of creating and maintaining a high level of citizenship 
as well as a social and industrial mobility, have always 
very properly been a matter of deep public concern. And 
it is important to note that at the present time, with the 
problems of citizenship presenting themselves in new phases, 
the public schools are recognized as more than ever the 
crucibles in which elements of discord are to be blended 
and fused, and a harmonious citizenship on the high levels 
of democratic efficiency well maintained. 

But of this work of the public schools in our political 
life, I shall have occasion to speak further. I was about to 
remark that, although Virginia and the Southern colonies had 
from the first been less democratic in their population than 
the Northern colonies, they were by no means committed 
to an aristocratic system. It happened that a good many 
Virginia landowners had come with the traditions of the 
country squires of England, and that a large number of 
laborers had come over indentured, from the ignorant 
and unprivileged working-classes. Yet these inequalities 



PROBLEMS OF POPULATION AND CITIZENSHIP 47 

would have adjusted themselves in due time if it had not 
been for the gradual development of negro slavery. Land 
was abundant and easily acquired, the poorer classes were 
rapidly catching the independent spirit of the westward 
pioneer movement, and the statesmen who framed the 
northwestern ordinance for Ohio, and who applied its pro- 
visions three years later to Kentucky and Tennessee, and 
eight years later to the territory that soon afterward be- 
came Mississippi and Alabama, had no thought of the 
development of different agricultural, economic, or social 
systems north and south of the Ohio River. 

When the new states were admitted to the Union, South 
as well as North, all the unoccupied lands belonged abso- 
lutely in fee simple to the national government by express 
acknowledgment of the states themselves. These lands 
were to be sold under uniform laws and conditions, and 
everybody expected to see the same kind of American 
agricultural commonwealths in the South as in the North. 
Slavery was looked upon as a thing to be tolerated for the 
present, but as a thing exceptional, undesirable, not com- 
patible with conditions of American life, and therefore 
temporary. 

There was nothing in the nature of the climate, nothing 
in the soil, nothing in the people, to make Kentucky or 
Tennessee, or even the highland parts of Alabama or Mis- 
sissippi, in any way essentially different from Ohio, Indi- 
ana, or lUinois. We simply drifted, without a dream of 
the dire consequences, into an immense expansion of 
the slavery system through a series of circumstances and 
historical causes. For one thing, we were near the West 
Indies, where the lack of white labor and the profits from 
sugar, tobacco, and other products, brought about a large 



48 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

and rapid development of the negro slave system, and 
afforded enormously profitable trade in slaves on the one 
hand, and in sugar, rum, and various commodities on the 
other hand, for the hardy seafaring men of the New 
England coast. 

The warmer, alluvial parts of our South adopted the plan- 
tation methods of the West Indies, and in the lack of white 
labor began to acquire increasing numbers of negroes. In 
extending the provisions of the Ordinance of 1787 to the 
new Southern territories, while not prohibiting the insti- 
tution of slavery, we had expressly prohibited the impor- 
tation of slaves from outside the country. Subsequently, 
in 1808, we had abolished the foreign slave-trade altogether. 
From that time forth the demands of the lower South for 
negro labor had to be supplied from the more northerly 
states, and the domestic slave-trade became a profitable 
form of migration. 

After a time it became apparent that negro slavery was 
very much interfering with the right kind of social demo- 
cratic progress among the Southern white people. It 
was accentuating an aristocratic class of land-owning, 
slave-owning people, and it was putting obstacles in the 
way of the prosperity of the white majority who would 
otherwise have been owning and cultivating rich farms, 
as in the states north of the Ohio River. The drift of these 
poorer whites was to the hills and mountains of western 
Virginia, eastern Kentucky, western North Carolina, east- 
ern Tennessee, northern and western Georgia, and northern 
Alabama. Into these regions of forest upland the slavery 
system did not penetrate, but the soil was too poor for 
successful agriculture, the people lost touch with the 
outside world, and declined, rather than gained, in culture 



PROBLEMS OF POPULATION AND CITIZENSHIP 49 

and civilization. Thus the South was greatly hampered 
in the development of a social democracy on a high level 
of intelligence and political capacity. 

But the far more serious difficulty that men began to 
foresee lay in the numerical growth of a great body of 
African laborers, domiciled in an extending group of our 
states, and forming an element which could never be ab- 
sorbed in that great social and political brotherhood which 
was the ideal of American citizenship and which originally 
looked upon our nation as one great family, like the 
Jewish commonwealth of old. Then began the efforts 
of the American Colonization Society, whose underlying 
motives were not chiefly those of the abolitionist, but 
those of far-seeing men who could discern nothing but 
danger and difficulty in the future presence here of great 
bodies of negroes, whether slave or free. 

Their movement came too late, however, to be of any 
practical effect. It was helpless, hke a floating plank, 
against the strong economic tide that was moving in the 
opposite direction. 

We should have grown cotton even more successfully, 
maintained a homogeneous citizenship, and avoided a 
majority of our most dangerous and exasperating political 
problems, if we had never introduced African slavery at 
all. But the movement of history grows out of causes too 
complex to be perfectly regulated at a given moment by 
the collective intelligence or virtue of any community. 
Consequences are not discernible from the beginning, and 
nations have to learn by experience. 

At least it may be said that the experience of one evil 
may show how to avert another. For one thing, our ex- 
perience with slavery has shown us in the larger problems 



50 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

of our political life that we must so apply statesmanship 
as to prevent those social or sectional divergences which 
might go too far for reconciliation, and lead to disunion or 
civil war. The existence of slavery as a developing eco- 
nomic system created differences of growing intensity which 
would otherwise have had no reason to exist. Extreme 
theories of states' rights have in logic no natural abiding 
place in this country, unless in the smaller of the original 
colonies, like Rhode Island and Delaware. Otherwise 
those doctrines are merely shifting symptoms appearing 
now here, now there, at the moment when some state 
or locality is conscious of a separate interest, or rankles 
with some sense of injustice. 

But as the South grew into a prosperity based upon the 
slave system, it began to seek justification. It set up the 
new theory that the Southern people were essentially unlike 
the Northern in origin and characteristics, that their coun- 
try was radically different in climate and soil, that its 
economic institutions must be permanently different, and 
that accordingly its domestic and foreign policies should 
also have a permanently different character. 

Unity of sentiment and of ideals is what, more than any- 
thing else, binds a people together. This dwelling upon 
imaginary differences rapidly produced real differences. 
That is to say, there arose a divergence of sentiment and a 
wall of prejudice between North and South that made 
the normal working of poUtical life practically impossible. 

All this was intensified by the form in which anti-slavery 
sentiment began to assert itself in the North. Slavery had 
grown in this country as an institution in such a way that 
it was neither sensible nor just to attribute blame in any 
quarter. Mr. Lincoln approached the question with a per- 



PROBLEMS OF POPULATION AND CITIZENSHIP 51 

fectly normal mind. He saw that the country could not go 
on successfully if the spread of slavery were not restricted 
by its exclusion from the territories. Kansas had been 
kept free by the superior numbers and energy of the anti- 
slavery Northern and Western people as colonizers. Men 
like Mr. Lincoln would have calmed the excited apprehen- 
sion of the South, and would meanwhile have built up the 
great West with such a development of free American citi- 
zens, recruited by millions of sturdy emigrants from Euro- 
pean countries, as to have given the united forces of our 
modern social democracy an unquestioned advantage. 
The growth of railroads and the advance of modern 
industry would in due time have invaded the slave states 
in such a way as to prove that the economic advantages 
of slavery were only temporary in their character. Then 
would have come about some just and statesmanlike scheme 
for emancipation. 

But the New England conscience, — which had played so 
valuable a part in the making of American ideals, and which 
had done so much to evolve that sense of public spirit and 
social justice, apart from personal or private advantage, 
which has molded the citizenship of the country, and shaped 
its practical political issues, — had come to look at the 
slavery question primarily from the standpoint of abstract 
human rights. It would be as useless to quarrel with this 
phase of American idealism as to try to argue down the east 
wind. The passion against slavery, as in violation of the 
fundamental principle of human liberty, grew to such a 
point that the unity of the country was menaced quite as 
much by the impatience and bitterness of the Northern 
abolitionists as by the crystallizing of doctrine and senti- 
ment in the South. 



52 POLITICAL PROBLEMS. OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

This passion for human freedom and for the imme- 
diate translation into terms of practical American political 
life of the abstract theories of the rights of man, was in 
total disregard of the normal processes of historical and 
political evolution. But it is a plain fact of ordinary- 
observation that history is not content to move by orderly 
process. An intense sentiment, like that which existed in 
the South, or a great passion for abstract right and justice, 
like that which was growing in the North, is quite as likely 
as anything else to create political issues and problems. 
These feelings proceed to make or mar the page of history, 
without regard to the warnings of the discerning and the 
dispassionate. In other words, that very capacity for social 
and political idealism, and for devotion to abstract concep- 
tions of right and justice, which had done so much to give 
the American people its solidarity and its elevation, was 
the factor that most endangered its continuance, when 
diverging tendencies had on both sides led to conflict for 
the sake of high principle. 

I dwell upon this because it is with us an ever recurring 
tendency. The chief danger in several of our moments 
or periods of political crisis has arisen from the fact that 
both sides have conceived of their respective positions as 
theoretically and ideally just. Thus, each side, so far at 
least as the rank and file were concerned, came to feel that 
it was contending unselfishly for high principles and a true 
cause. 

Ever since the conclusion of the Civil War, the Southern 
negro question has in countless ways played a vital part in 
our larger political life as well as in the local political life 
of the South itself. And very much of the strain and diffi- 
culty attending the injection of this question into the national 



PROBLEMS OF POPULATION AND CITIZENSHIP 53 

life has been due to the intensity of theoretical views and 
convictions. I shall have occasion to recur to the negro 
question in several of its political phases, but meanwhile 
let us turn to some other questions relating to our popula- 
tion and citizenship, and having a bearing upon the prob- 
lems of our political life. 

Soon after the Revolutionary War, our adventurous 
young Americans were flocking westward, taking up lands 
under military grants to Revolutionary soldiers, and found- 
ing communities as far west as the Mississippi River. I 
need not pause here to speak of negotiations for the acquisi- 
tion of the Florida country or for the free navigation of the 
mouths of the Mississippi. It became our good fortune, 
through the exigency of high politics, due to the French 
Revolution and the Napoleonic struggle, to acquire the 
great Louisiana country. Our experience in creating the 
newer sovereignties east of the Mississippi was promptly 
applied to the situations farther west. We were prepar- 
ing what were soon to be unequaled opportunities for fifty 
millions or a hundred millions of people. These facts were 
not to be turned into immediate realities, but success was 
assured with reasonable effort. 

As I have already said, the people in our original colonies 
were more well-to-do in their average lot, even in the period 
before the Revolution, than any like number of people in 
the countries from which they had come. In the period fol- 
lowing the Revolution, in spite of the episode of our second 
war with England, our economic and social conditions were 
vastly more agreeable than those of European lands. If, 
therefore, the opportunities afforded by the growth of Ohio, 
Indiana, Illinois, and the other northwestern states, were 
sufficient to tempt hundreds of thousands of the younger 



54 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

generation to leave the old homesteads of New England, 
New York, and Pennsylvania, while the sons of Virginia, 
the Carolinas, and Georgia were flocking across the moun- 
tains to Tennessee, Alabama, Missomi, and Arkansas, it 
is not strange that conditions thus inviting should have 
appealed to many people living under less favored circum- 
stances in the European countries. 

Men migrate for a great variety of reasons. It had taken 
strong motives and high resolution to create our original 
settlements in the early part of tlie seventeenth century. 
Wliether they were seeking opportunities to exercise prin- 
ciples of civil and religious liberty, or hoped to profit by 
finding precious metals or by trade with the Indians, they 
were a picked and hardy lot of men and women ; and in the 
struggle to give permanence to their settlements, they 
created unsurpassed opportunities for their own posterity 
as well as for millions of later comers. 

An immense variety of circumstances has cooperated 
to bring about such a movement of alien population to our 
shores as history does not parallel. Early migrations 
had brought a considerable German population to this coun- 
try, and it had located chiefly in Pennsylvania. But most 
of our population had been derived from the British Islands. 
The Scotch-Irish had become very numerous in the Middle 
States and had followed the valleys of the Appalachian 
system southward, and their families have increased and 
multiplied as one of the most important factors of the essen- 
tial American stock. With the firm establishment of the 
American republic, British and German immigrants came 
steadily enough to have added important new elements 
to our population previous to 1845. But the movement 
on a very large scale began at about that time. 



PROBLEMS OF POPULATION AND CITIZENSHIP 55 

The great Irish famine, due to successive failures of the 
potato crop, was at its worst in 1846, and the migration of 
Irish people to the United States, which had averaged about 
thirty thousand a year, at once increased to more than 
one hundred thousand. In the decade from 1845 to 1855 
more than a million and a half of Irish people came to this 
country. In that same period there was a similar increase 
in the movement of Germans, due in great part to political 
trouble and discontent, and to apprehensions of war. The 
wave of liberalism that swept across Europe in 1848 and 
thereabouts resulted in sending to our shores a large body 
of people of a desirable class. Our own financial and eco- 
nomic reaction, culminating in the panic of 1857, together 
with the gathering of storm clouds over our political skies, 
sharply reduced the volume of immigration in the years 
immediately before the Civil War. But from 1845 to the 
outbreak of the war, we had received in fifteen years 
a million and a half Germans, two million Irish people, 
and more than half a million people of other European 
nationahties. 

At the time when the westward movement had fairly 
set in after the opening of the Northwest Territory and the 
new country south of the Ohio, there was an almost even 
division of population between the North and the South. 
But in 1860, when the country had reached a population of 
31,400,000, 21,000,000, or more than two-thirds, were in 
the free states and territories, as against a little more than 
10,000,000 in the slave states, of whom more than 3,000,000 
were slaves. European immigrants had not been willing 
to go to the slave states (with such limited exceptions as 
the German accessions to St. Louis and some other com- 
mercial towns). The North and West, on the other hand, 



56 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

were building railroads and developing farm lands and new- 
population centers. There was a great demand for labor 
such as the fresh contingents of Irish and Germans afforded. 

Our cities were then relatively small, and the new foreign 
elements came so rapidly as to create new and difficult 
problems. "Know-nothingism," a form of organized oppo- 
sition to foreign domination, provoked chiefly by the voting 
strength of the Irish in the cities, made its brief political 
sensation, only to be lost in the more serious controversies 
of a stormy decade. Statisticians differ as to the number 
of people North and West who, at the outbreak of the Civil 
War, were of foreign birth or the descendants of immigrants 
who had arrived within thirty or forty years. It is at least 
conservative to estimate that of the 21,000,000, fully one- 
third, or from 7,000,000 to 8,000,000, belonged to what we 
may call our foreign element. Many of them had come to 
escape European wars, but they were drawn into our 
contest, and they clearly turned the balance. 

With the conclusion of the war, we entered upon a period 
of unprecedented expansion. The death losses of the war 
had been great, but the development of capacity and energy 
in the surviving two million or more of young men who 
had borne arms was speedily transmuted into a wonderful 
national asset. The opening of the West was entered upon 
with stupendous energy, the industrial life of the nation 
grew more mature and complex, and the demand for labor 
far outstripped the home supply. The Western states set 
up official immigration bureaus; the Western railroads, 
which had obtained vast land grants, conducted immi- 
gration bureaus of their own; and the steamship com- 
panies, finding the business profitable, did everything 
in their power to stimulate the movement of population 



PROBLEMS OF POPULATION AND CITIZENSHIP 57 

to America. Most important of all, however, was the 
propaganda conducted by the immigrants themselves. 
Thus, immediately following the Civil War, there was an- 
other large accession, reaching its climax just before the 
period of hard times that followed the panic of 1873. In 
1880 the movement set in again very strongly, and in 
1882 nearly 800,000 landed at our ports. Not until 1903 
was this number exceeded or nearly reached, but there had 
been for many years an average annual arrival of about 
half a million. In 1905 the number exceeded a million, 
and in 1906 it was beyond 1,100,000. 

For some years past, moreover, there had been a total 
change in the racial character of immigrants, due to changed 
conditions in Europe. Ireland was now under-populated, 
and Irish political and social discontent had been allayed 
through numerous political reforms. German industrial 
progress had become so great as to have improved economic 
conditions at home, and the tide of emigration had been 
much reduced in consequence. In Italy, on the other 
hand, there had been large growth of surplus population, 
with small corresponding development of industrial oppor- 
tunity. Just as in this country at certain periods the 
migratory spirit has affected entire districts, as when 
northern New England poured into Illinois and Iowa; 
Ohio into Kansas and Missouri ; or Iowa into the Dakotas, 
so in like manner from time to time the American fever has 
swept through particular districts or countries of Eiu-ope. 

It affected Sweden and Norway to such an extent that 
there are perhaps more Scandinavians in our Northwest than 
a,re left in Europe. It was now affecting the lower half of the 
Italian peninsula, and entire neighborhoods were being de- 
populated. An equilibrium will in due time be established 



58 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

in Italy, the migratory fever will abate, and we shall have 
here several millions of Italians and their descendants, to 
whom for our own well-being we must apply our principles 
and methods of leveling up. 

In place of the former influx of people from the German 
Empire, we were now receiving hundreds of thousands from 
the strange and varied nationalities of the Austro-Hun- 
garian Empire. Previous to 1880, that empire did not fur- 
nish us with 1 per cent of our immigrants. It was in 1906 
supplying 25 per cent of them. Italy was also supplying 
25 per cent, whereas the movement of Italians was very 
small up to 1890. In the twenty years previous to 1880, 
about 1 per cent of our immigrants came from the Russian 
Empire. Since 1890, the movement from Russia had been 
large and steadily growing, until it constituted 20 per cent 
of the total. At the present time (1907) our newcomers 
from Europe are arriving at the rate of about a miUion a 
year, of whom nearly 700,000 are from southern and eastern 
Europe, including about 150,000 Hebrews, nearly all from 
Russia. 

In proportion to our total population, immigration was 
larger in the movement that culminated in 1854 than it 
has been at any time since. But the intensity of life in 
the Civil War period, and the strength of the agricultural 
and industrial movements that followed the war, undoubt- 
edly had a fusing and transforming effect that greatly quick- 
ened the process of Americanizing the foreign elements. 
Having in mind its early colonization, — which, besides the 
main factors from the British Islands, included German, 
Dutch, Swedish, and Swiss, as well as French and Spanish 
elements, — the composite American nationality did not lose 
faith in its power to assimilate all comers. 



PROBLEMS OF POPULATION AND CITIZENSHIP 59 

Our sdiools, our free economic life, and the practice of 
self-government in our townships and villages were relied 
upon to turn the first generation of foreigners into sym- 
pathetic, law-abiding, and useful members of the body 
politic, and to bring the second and third generations into 
complete unison and accord with all the distinctive notes of 
American life. 

This surely was a great deal to expect. Whatever might 
have been the origins of the major part of the early Ameri- 
can stock, we had trained it up to a higher average of moral, 
intellectual, and economic well-being than could be found 
prevailing anywhere else. Our definite object, further- 
more, was not only to maintain this average, but to advance 
it as the nation spread out across the richer territories of 
the Mississippi Valley. Yet we were proclaiming the doc- 
trine of free asylum for all the world, were welcoming hordes 
of laborers, regardless of nationality or previous condition, 
and were proposing to assimilate and absorb them without 
deteriorating our resulting racial composite. It was a 
daring experiment, and one never tried elsewhere on any 
similar scale of variety and magnitude. Upon an impar- 
tial statement of the facts it would have seemed not merely 
paradoxical but disastrous, if not impossible. Yet, in so 
far as we can judge of it, up to a recent period, it has been 
successful. 

And this success has been largely due to the very circum- 
stances which might have seemed the most discouraging. 
Between the years 1820 and 1906 we received more than 
24,000,000 foreign immigrants, who with their descendants 
to-day undoubtedly constitute much the larger half of our 
75,000,000 white population. A few of these people came 
with the advantages of education, and a few with property. 



60 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

But these were rare exceptions. There were many farmers 
and skilled workmen, but the vast majority were from the 
humble ranks of European laborers. They were ignorant, 
like the general class from which they had come, and many 
of them were in other respects ill-conditioned. 

We learned by degrees to enforce certain minimum stand- 
ards in order to protect ourselves against the arrival of 
notorious criminals, habitual paupers, and those mani- 
festly belonging to the dependent, defective, and delinquent 
classes. But, otherwise, the doors were wide open. The 
very fact that the immigrants were ignorant and poor, — 
that they had no pride of ancestry and no memory of for- 
tunate conditions at home, — made it the easier for them 
to accept the conditions of a new country and to cherish 
great hopes for their children. They came at a time when 
we were building railroads, creating industrial and manu- 
facturing centers, and rearranging our population by a 
twofold movement, — one to the commercial and manufac- 
turing towns and one to the new lands of the West. They 
found here an ample reward for industry and thrift, and were 
willing to enter our industrial school in the lowest class, so 
to speak. This gave us opportunity for a much more rapid 
development of complex economic life than would other- 
wise have been possible. 

For a good while the Germans engaged in a variety of 
humble callings, and the Irish supplied the demand for 
unskilled manual labor. The older American element found 
an increased opportunity for leadership and direction in 
business, social, and political life. In the midst of these 
changing conditions, there remained a sufficient social and 
economic mobility to prevent the formation of class lines 
or race groups. The farm-hand could learn farming, save 



PROBLEMS OF POPULATION AND CITIZENSHIP 61 

money, and reasonably hope to become a landowner. If 
the wage-earner in mill or factory or mine could not well 
expect to change his own occupation for the better, he could 
center his hopes in his children. 

The public schools became more than ever the essential 
institution of the country. However imperfect their meth- 
ods of teaching, • they were at least making it certain that 
the children of all classes of immigrants would adopt the 
English language, reading and writing it as well as speak- 
ing it, and would acquire the American point of view. 

If these immigrants had come to us in association with 
a great number of men of wealth and high intelligence 
from their own countries, they would almost inevitably 
have been drawn into geographical groups, where they 
would have perpetuated their own languages and customs. 
They would not merely have introduced new racial ele- 
ments, but they would have altered the social structure. 
Wisconsin would have become a permanently German State, 
like portions of southern Brazil. We should have had 
Italian elements retaining their own language and charac- 
teristics, like the Italians of Argentina. Minnesota would 
have become Swedish, and the Dakotas Norwegian. 

Our experiment hitherto has shown us the transform- 
ing power of democratic institutions and ideals under fa- 
vorable conditions. It does not follow, however, that the 
incidental evils and difficulties of what in the main has been 
a fortunate and successful movement, may not grow until 
they require, not merely ordinary remedies, but also sharp 
preventive checks. Time and experience alone can tell 
us. It unquestionably remains the general intention of the 
American people to adhere- to their old views regarding 
the essential soHdarity of American citizenship. 



Ill 



FURTHER REMARKS UPON IMMIGRATION AND RACE QUES- 
TIONS, WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO THE SOUTH- 
ERN PROBLEM 

From the beginning we had carefully guarded the prin- 
ciple of free migration within our own territories. And, 
although we did not express the principle in a formal way, 
we also cherished the idea that this country should always 
afford free asylum to those who chose to come here because 
of religious, or civic, or economic disadvantage in Europe. 
So deep-rooted was this idea, that even those extreme 
Protestants who formed the Know-nothing party in the 
fifties, to check the growing power of the Irish Catholics, 
had no more thought of putting restrictions upon immigra- 
tion than of limiting the freedom of movement from one 
state to another. 

It was not until the influx of Chinese labor on the 
Pacific coast became very large that the doctrine of uni- 
versal asylum was brought into serious dispute. Laborers in 
great numbers were needed for building the Pacific rail- 
roads and other tasks of Pacific coast development. Fewer 
than one hundred thousand Chinese laborers had been 
imported before 1870, but in the following years the num- 
ber increased with great rapidity. American .workmen 
contended that the very essence of our institutions de- 
pended upon the maintenance of our accustomed standards 
of living. They argued that, with sources of supply so 

62 



IMMIGRATION AND RACE QUESTIONS 63 

vast, Chinese labor threatened not merely to disturb eco- 
nomic conditions temporarily, but to change permanently 
the social character of the Pacific coast states. 

It is needless to rehearse the now familiar facts and 
arguments. I wish only to recall certain points of view. 
The issues of the war and the controversies of Reconstruc- 
tion politics had intensified the New England view of 
human rights as such; and to deny the Chinese the right 
of free access to this country seemed like a base betrayal 
of a sacred cause which had triumphed in the emancipation 
and enfranchisement of the negroes. 

But the saner and more logical view carried the day. 
If the presence of the negro in a great democratic brother- 
hood of white men had proved so divisive, and had wrought 
such incalculable mischief, with endless trouble yet in 
store, why should we run the risk of adding to our future 
troubles by admitting a large Mongolian population to 
the Pacific coast, which would of necessity remain alien 
and distinct? 

At length, in 1879, Congress passed a bill limiting the 
number of Chinese who could be brought to the United 
States in any one vessel, to fifteen. President Hayes 
vetoed it because of its violation of treaty obligations. 
After due negotiation with China, another bill was passed 
in 1882, suspending the admission of Chinese laborers for 
ten years. And that suspension has been extended from 
time to time. The period was a critical one, and the action 
taken was opportune. Chinese labor served a temporary 
purpose of importance; but if the preventive check had 
not been applied a quarter of a century ago, it is reasonably 
probable that by this time conditions would have been 
beyond practical remedy. White labor would have avoided 



64 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

the Pacific coast, just as it avoided our Southern states in 
the slavery period. And the recent economic develop- 
ments of Oregon, Washington, and California, as well as of 
a series of states and territories adjacent to these, would 
have been dependent upon ever increasing relays of Asiatic 
labor. 

It is wholly probable that by this time the Chinese would 
have outnumbered the white population of our states west 
of the Rocky Mountains. Meanwhile their groups and colo- 
nies would have steadily increased in our Eastern cities, 
and every population center would have had its Chinatown, 
with all attendant features. I am firmly of the opinion 
that the Chinese exclusion act was of inestimable impor- 
tance, from the standpoint of our original American pur- 
pose to create and maintain a great unified nationality. 
In excluding the Chinese laborers, we decided rightly a 
constructive problem of great magnitude, and kept the 
Pacific coast for our own citizenship. 

More recently, the Pacific coast has been stirred up over 
the increase of Japanese immigration. The demand for labor 
is great, and the existing rule of exclusion has not applied 
to any Asiatics except Chinese. The influx of Japanese 
had not as yet reached such dimensions as to be alarming, 
although it had increased of late. The Japanese govern- 
ment understood the spirit of our policy, and was seeking to 
utilize the expansive and migratory energy of its people 
for the development of territories under its own control 
in Asia, especially Korea. Thus it prefers to check 
the movement of Japanese labor to the United States. 
If, however, such a check should not be put into effective 
operation, and the stream of Japanese immigration should 
greatly increase in volume, it is by no means unlikely 



IMMIGRATION AND RACE QUESTIONS 65 

that the arguments which led to the exclusion of Chinese 
labor twenty-five years ago would prevail as against im- 
migration from other Asiatic countries. Meanwhile, a prac- 
tical way to reduce the incoming of Japanese laborers was 
found by President Roosevelt and Secretary Root early in 
1907 by a passport regulation. Its chief significance lay 
in the fundamental policy of exclusion that undoubtedly 
inspired it. 

As respects the desirability of putting a radical check 
upon the volume of European immigration now arriving, 
it is difficult to view the question with any sort of perspec- 
tive. In times past when rapid influx might have suggested 
limitation, natural causes have so suddenly reduced the 
swollen stream as to dismiss the question in its immediate 
aspects. It is to be remembered that present tests keep 
back great numbers whom the steamship companies decline 
to receive at points of origin. 

If the test of literacy were added, we should further 
reduce the present movement by perhaps 30 per cent. 
Yet the illiterates come from disadvantaged regions, rather 
than from exceptionally degraded classes. Our labor 
market absorbs them, and their children enter the schools. 
The illiterates show no peculiar criminal or anti-social 
tendencies. If their lack of intelligence unfits them for 
anything, it is for the political franchise. An obvious 
remedy would lie in the direction of our attaching much 
greater importance to the process of naturalization, and 
restricting the franchise, in the case of the foreign-born, 
to those showing positive fitness for participation in our 
political and governmental life. 

The inconveniences due to the massing of new popu- 
lation elements in our great cities will probably prove to 



66 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

be transitional. They put the greater burden on our public 
schools, and they give opportunity to the corruptionist and 
the demagogue in politics. The English language remains 
our great necessary bond. Our Constitution and our laws 
are written in that language, and it would be absolutely 
reasonable to admit no foreign-born citizen to the franchise 
who cannot read the laws in the language of this country. 
The more polyglot the newer immigration becomes, the 
more reasonable and desirable is an insistence upon the 
common use for public purposes of one language. 

Whether or not we find it desirable to adopt any sweeping 
form of restriction upon the freedom of honest working 
people to make their homes in this coimtry, we shall con- 
tinue undoubtedly to extend and to perfect the existing 
forms of regulation. We shall have better inspection and 
sifting at the points of embarkation. We shall greatly 
increase our efforts to promote a better distribution of 
immigrants throughout the country. We shall encourage 
the renewed efforts of Southern and Western states to divert 
immigrant population from the Eastern cities. We shall 
watch with extreme interest the experiments which are 
soon to test thoroughly the newer forms of demand for 
European labor in the Southern states. 

In spite of the difficulties caused by his presence, the South- 
ern states have upon the whole accorded to the negro the 
amplest opportunities in economic directions. He is not 
only permitted but encouraged to own land, and all occu- 
pations are open to him. There is no working class in 
any European country possessing a tithe of the advantages 
that are at the hand of the negro working class of our 
Southern states. Their leaders have failed to perceive 
this, with a few exceptions. From this time forth the 



IMMIGRATION AND RACE QUESTIONS 67 

negro will be subjected to a new and increasingly severe 
competition with white labor of recent European origin. 

If the negro cannot meet this test, he will gradually lose 
relative position. Negro slavery was destroyed by Irish 
and German immigrants, who became a makeweight that 
gave the North and West an irresistible preponderance. 
The ultimate solution of the negro question in its more 
recent phases will probably come about through the diver- 
sion of European immigration to Southern states. Of 
the twenty-four millions who have come here since 1820 
very few have gone into the area of the old slave states. 
They have entered into the complex industrial and agri- 
cultural development of the North and West. The South 
has remained agricultural and has made limited de- 
mands upon the world's labor market. But it is entering 
upon a new industrial period, and it will undoubtedly 
secure great accessions of European-born workmen. The 
new competition will be good for the negro, because 
it will result in the survival of the fittest, although it 
will restrict the relative growth of negro population. It is 
the most interesting of our future problems. 

The negro race question in some of its jelations to politi- 
cal parties is one to which I shall have to recur in a subse- 
quent chapter. I am here and now discussing problems of 
population and race in their more fundamental aspects. I 
have endeavored to show that from the very beginning it 
has been the object of the American people, organized as a 
state in the large sense of that word, to develop a unified 
nationality. The carrying out of. this great object could 
only have been accomplished by positive political action. 
It required the national extension of domain in order that 
contiguous unoccupied territory might be developed upon 



68 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

a uniform plan of American institutional life, and with a 
population essentially homogeneous. 

I have shown briefly how the problems presented by the 
existence here of aboriginal Indian tribes — problems that 
seemed so formidable to our forefathers — have been 
gradually overcome until their final solution can be readily 
foreseen. I have tried to point out the significance of the 
arrival here before and after the Civil War period of great 
bodies of Irishmen and Germans who have become, in 
their younger generations, so assimilated with the older 
American population, as to have disappeared from the dis- 
tinct place they held for a time in our pohtical life. Some 
differentiation of tradition is a desirable thing in any nation, 
for it gives color and variety to life; and long may St. 
Patrick's Day be remembered and observed in America. 
But Mr. Redmond finds here a younger generation of sons 
of Ireland who are quite ignorant of the present phases of 
Irish politics, and almost hopelessly indifferent to them, 
while intensely alive to the problems of this country. The 
younger generation of German ancestry, moreover, while 
keeping alive a certain tradition of distinctive traits and 
qualities, is losing even a slight acquaintance with the 
German language. 

In short, the descendants of the great German migration 
to this country in the period from 1850 to 1880 are now 
more completely Americanized than many of the descend- 
ants of the Germans who settled in Pennsylvania almost 
two hundred years ago, because drawn into the main cur- 
rents of the national life. These great population elements 
of Irish and German stock are too deeply engaged with 
their functions in the economic, social, and political life 
of America, — these functions now including the work of 



IMMIGRATION AND RACE QUESTIONS 69 

Americanizing the new hordes of Italians, Hungarians, 
Poles, and Russians, — to maintain those distinctions and 
prejudices which for a time gave us German-Americans and 
Irish-Americans, as factors to be reckoned with in our 
political life. It may be added that in like manner the 
Scandinavian-American is destined soon to become extinct. 
The Scandinavians of the Northwest are becoming fully- 
American with a rapidity of assimilation that leaves noth- 
ing to be desired. 

These processes of transition are critical, somewhat in 
the measure of the contrasts to be overcome. Some tem- 
porary evils are not to be wholly avoided. We are careful, 
indeed, to exclude so far as possible the coming of criminals 
from European countries. But speaking generally, our 
criminal elements have not been so much recruited from 
the ranks of immigrants themselves as it is customary to 
believe. The criminal recruits have, rather, come from 
the American-born children of immigrants, and they have 
spent some years in our public schools. It is a passing 
phase, due to natural difficulties of adjustment. 

This fact relates to a very important and fundamental 
problem of our present public life. From the early days 
in this country, in whatever terms we may have expressed 
it, we have recognized the fact that the permanence of our 
institutions depended, not upon the forms of our written 
constitutions and laws, but upon the transmission of our 
best ideals from one generation to the next. In the early 
days this preeminent task of turning the younger genera- 
tion into Americans was shared, with the school, by the 
home, the church, and various institutions of neighbor- 
hood life. The stupendous influx of foreign elements, and 
the positive decline in the birth-rate of the older American 



70 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

stock, has now changed and intensified the problem of 
maintaining American standards and ideals. During the 
transitional periods a greatly increased burden of responsi- 
bility must rest upon the public schools. 

Prevailing standards of American life are much higher 
in most respects than those of the European laborers and 
peasants who make up the great part of our more recent 
immigration. The arriving adults enter honestly and hope- 
fully into our industrial life. Whatever problems of an 
acute or immediate sort their arrival in large numbers may 
present, the continuing and serious problem is that which 
looks to the next generation. These arriving laborers 
cannot themselves dominate the country or very seriously 
disturb its public condition. Their labor assists in our 
development and enrichment. Their ignorance often leads 
to their political exploitation by demagogues. But this 
belongs, again, to those passing phases of political Hfe that, 
though often acute, are superficial and transient. 

The deep and abiding problem is that of the transforma- 
tion of the Scandinavian, or Italian, or Polish child into an 
American citizen as firmly loyal to our ideals and as capable 
of doing a citizen's part as if his ancestors had lived in this 
country for four generations under favorable conditions. 
Fortunately, the opportunities afforded by American life 
still have their power to kindle the imagination of the new- 
comers. They soon find that they have everything to gain 
and nothing to lose by a complete merging into the life of 
this country. This hopeful receptivity on the part of the 
immigrant has only to be met by wise plans and provisions 
on our part for his full adoption into the American family. 

If we find that the process of assimilation is not seriously 
disturbed, there would seem no sufficient reason for attempt- 



IMMIGRATION AND RACE QUESTIONS 71 

ing to place severe and arbitrary restrictions upon the flow 
of European immigrants to our shores. The fact that our 
industrial activities have readily absorbed the new labor 
supply of the past decade would not permanently justify 
so huge a volume of immigration unless it were reasonably 
certain that these strange people would cease to be alien 
and would in due time become merged and blended and 
altogether American. 

Heretofore, as I have said, our European accessions have 
come in periods bearing some relation to our waves of 
business prosperity. This was true of the great migration 
that reached its climax in 1854. It was similarly true of 
that which set in after the Civil War and attained its 
maximum in 1873. The next year of climax was in 1882, 
which brought us nearly 800,000 immigrants. This was 
five or six times as many as came in 1877 or 1878. It 
is true that the average from 1903 to 1907 has been 
about a milhon a year. But from 1894 to 1899 the 
average was only a quarter of a million. The changes of 
this human tide come with startling abruptness ; and while 
we are discussing ways and means to prevent a complete 
inundation, the situation is likely enough to alter of itself, 
so that, instead of a million a year, we may be receiving a 
half or a quarter of that number. 

It would probably be advantageous if the graphic line 
that indicates these changes were less violent in its fluctua- 
tion. A steadying and an equalizing of the current of 
migration would be beneficial. It is, of course, to be 
remembered that aU checks are expected to operate at 
the point of origin, so that the disqualified would suffer 
no hardship from rejection. Tests should therefore be of 
a simple kind, easy to imderstand. The idea that adult 



72 POLITICAL PEOBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

immigrants should know how to read and write their own 
language and should have a small amount of property is 
not unreasonable in itself, and might in times of prosper- 
ity operate rather desirably than otherwise. For, in the 
seasons of maximum influx, the limit is fixed by the 
capacity of the steamships. If tests of education and prop- 
erty were established, immigration would still be very large 
in periods of great demand for labor. Another method 
of equalizing and somewhat limiting immigration is found 
in the tendency to require a larger cubic air space for each 
person in the steerage of ships. And along a similar line 
is the proposal to fix the maximum number which any 
ship may bring at one time. The new immigration law of 
1907 requires more ship space, and in other ways extends 
the oversight of the government. 

It is possible by regulations of one kind or another to 
retard somewhat the inflow, and to discriminate somewhat 
in favor of the more intelligent and thrifty as against those 
who in Europe always live close to the pauper line. But 
all the burden of proof thus far must rest with those who 
assert that harsh and severe restrictions are necessary. 
So long as our labor market can make good use of the 
arriving adults, while our school-teachers report that their 
efforts — together with the other assimilating forces of 
American life — can mold the children into a safe and 
responsible type of American citizenship, we have no cause 
for grave apprehension. 

The structure of our political life is such, thanks to the 
foresight of the founders of the Republic, that we have been 
able thus far to receive foreigners into our citizenship with- 
out detriment. And the structure of our economic and 
industrial life is such in its variety and complexity that we 



IMMIGRATION AND RACE QUESTIONS 73 

have been able to utilize all classes of foreign labor without 
impairing freedom of movement and change. We are not 
hardening our population into classes or castes or groups, 
whether of different trades or callings, or of different 
nationalities. The Italian, coming now in the twentieth 
century, finds the same freedom of opportunity that the 
German or Irishman found half a century earlier. He 
begins as a common laborer at excellent wages, finds pro- 
motion in certain special callings, whether as a cobbler of 
shoes or a dealer in fruit, and moves easily and readily 
forward in every line of craftsmanship or trade or pro- 
fessional pursuit. Such is the process ; and without undue 
optimism I am bound to say that it seems entirely safe 
and wholesome. 

Even to the complaint that of the recent newcomers the 
great majority are at present retained in the East, and add 
to the foreign character of our larger cities, there are hopeful 
answers to be made. First, these cities are the centers of 
certain forms of industry that give the newcomers immedi- 
ate employment and a safe introduction to American life in 
close contact with many earlier comers of their own na- 
tionality. The forces of attrition and assimilation in a 
metropolis like New York are very great. From the 
necessities of the case the public schools of such a city 
recognize and accept the function of training foreign chil- 
dren to be Americans. If one were searching for a pre- 
eminent focus of patriotic American enthusiasm, he would 
find nothing to answer that description more satisfactorily 
than a representative public school of New York or Chicago, 
where more than 90 per cent of the children are of non- 
English-speaking foreign parentage. 

From the beginning the Americans have been a composite 



74 POLITICAL PEOBLJEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

European race, and we must reconcile ourselves to the idea 
that the earlier stock is to be superseded by the later. The 
French race in France holds its own in numbers. It gains 
a very little, by absorption of a few immigrants from Italy 
and other Latinic peoples. But the early American stock 
east of the Alleghanies and north of Virginia does not thus 
hold its own. We are witnessing a veritable transformation 
of the American people, so far as race and stock are con- 
cerned. But through it all, American life seems to have 
more, rather than less, of its old power to assimilate the 
newcomer. The public schools and the contacts of the 
playground, the street, and the shop give all children the 
fluent use of the English language, and the newspapers do 
the rest. 

The hundreds or thousands of papers printed here in 
other languages merely serve the convenience of the first 
generation of newcomers. They are useful in their way, 
because they give knowledge of American institutions and 
life to naturalized citizens in the only language they have 
learned to read. But from the larger standpoint they are 
transient and negligible. The second generation reads 
English by preference, and the third generation is unable 
to read anything else. 

While, therefore, the whole great tendency is just what 
should be desired, and precisely in keeping with the hopes 
and aims of the founders of the country, it follows none the 
less that there are many problems of serious importance 
growing out of this unprecedented task of assimilation; 
and these problems are to be dealt with in the course of 
the day's work. Education under these circumstances 
becomes the foremost task of enlightened statesmanship. 
Not only must schools be universally provided at whatever 



IMMIGKATION AND RACE QUESTIONS 75 

cost to the public treasury, but the best thought of the 
country must concern itself to see that the schools employ 
the right means to reach the desired ends. For the schools 
no longer exist principally to impart instruction in the art 
of reading, or in arithmetic, or in geography, thus merely 
supplementing the work that was done for the child in the 
home life of our earlier American society, — but the schools 
exist nowadays to perpetuate the elements of American 
life, and to maintain its ideals and its traditions. 

Moreover, this work of assimilating new elements of 
population, on so vast a scale, justifies and requires special 
social and public movements, such as that for the preven- 
tion of the employment of young children in factories and 
mines. In earher periods, the state could safely neglect 
some forms of social control and oversight. It could tax 
the community to provide the public school, while leaving 
it entirely to the discretion of parents whether or not their 
children should attend. And in like manner it could leave 
the industrial employment of children without public regu- 
lation. But under these newer conditions, while the state 
may endure the burdens and the difficulties thrown upon 
it by the presence here of millions of adults of little or no 
education, of slight acquaintance with our language, and 
of no fitness or aptitude for the political life to which we so 
readily admit them, it is plain enough that such conditions 
are endured because they are considered transient, and that 
the state cannot and will not permit them to become per- 
petuated or intensified through neglect of the children. 

It belongs, therefore, to a sound program of constructive 
politics, first, to provide ample school facilities for all chil- 
dren; second, to see that the schools have such a character 
as to train children for American citizenship and for useful 



76 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVEVOPMENT 

places in the economic life; third, to see that all children 
are actually taught and trained, directly or indirectly, 
under the auspices of the state ; and fourth, as a necessary 
corollary, to prevent parents and employers from depriv- 
ing children of their rightful opportunities of instruction 
and training. This program is a very large one, and its 
urgency cannot fairly be questioned. 

Hitherto it has been deemed sufficient to leave both the 
expense and the control of this work of elementary educa- 
tion to the respective states, — although this remark admits 
of some important modifications. From the very begin- 
ning the nation itself recognized the free neighborhood 
school as one of the foundation stones upon which its 
institutions must rest; and in the disposal of the public 
lands, the national government — presupposing the estab- 
lishment everywhere of such free school systems — gave 
certain sections or square miles in every township toward 
the creation of school endowment funds. In other and 
analogous ways, the nation has recognized the schools as an 
essential of American life, and has made further grants, 
usually in the form of lands, to the respective states for 
educational purposes. 

The conditions of life in the South before the Civil War 
had not been favorable to such a development of free public 
schools as had been attained in the North and West. In 
the period following the war, it became manifestly necessary 
to provide schools in the South, and prevailing sentiment 
required a separate system for negro children. In the 
impoverished condition of the South, it was manifestly 
impossible to make suitable provision at once even for a 
single system of common schools, and the added expense 
of a double system meant a practical failure of both. The 



IMMIGRATION AND RACE QUESTIONS 77 

percentage of illiteracy had been high among the poorer 
white people of the South before the war, and the con- 
ditions that existed from 1860 to 1870 greatly increased this 
percentage. A wiser and more philosophical national 
statesmanship in the period from 1865 to 1885 would have 
recognized the economic and social rehabilitation of the 
South as the most important of the nation's public duties. 

But the passions and prejudices that culminated in the 
great war were destined to survive for a long time in the 
political life of the country. The North had not only 
emancipated the Southern negroes, but it had enfranchised 
them, and through delay in the granting of amnesty to the 
Southern white men, it had for a time placed the negroes in 
political control, with consequences that were appallingly 
disastrous. The withdrawal of federal troops from the 
Southern states, in 1877, had been followed by the immedi- 
ate exclusion of the negroes from the prominent place they 
had assumed in politics and government for ten years. The 
processes by which the white race not only asserted and 
gained political supremacy, but completely excluded negroes 
of all classes from participation in political life, were more 
than summary and drastic ; they were revolutionary. 

The negroes had been enfranchised without any train- 
ing to fit them for political responsibilities. Furthermore, 
they were arrayed in politics as one solid, numerical factor 
against everything that had previously constituted the po- 
litical structure and life of the Southern states. It was not 
merely an unwise situation, but it was unendurable, and 
it would have led to a race war of extermination, if white 
supremacy had not been able to assert itself when once 
the federal hand was withdrawn. Despite their losses in 
the Civil War, the whites were about twice as numerous as 



78 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

the negroes throughout the South as a whole, although in 
South Carolina and Mississippi the negroes were more 
numerous than the whites. 

History can always be trusted to interpret these move- 
ments with justice and without passion. But it is not easy 
for contemporaries or participants to see the full bearing of 
political events. It was natural that the Southern race 
question should have become involved in party contro- 
versy. The granting of political suffrage to the emanci- 
pated negroes followed the New England theory of abstract 
human rights, that had gained strength with the abolition 
movement, and it also appealed to the Republican leaders 
as a practical political measure. If the Southern states 
were to be readmitted to their places in the Union, it 
seemed to the Northern politicians necessary to enfranchise 
the negroes as a preliminary, by amendment of the national 
Constitution, for two reasons : first, to give the negroes 
themselves a political and legal method of self -protection 
in the states where they lived, and, second, to give the 
nation a constitutional method by which in future case 
of need it could support the negroes against harsh discrimi- 
nation and could also control federal elections. 

The great historical opportunity had come to make 
American citizenship national, in express terms of the 
Constitution, and to make the political franchise equal 
and universal throughout the country. In their broad 
significance, the 14th and 15th Amendments added to the 
Constitution those very principles, as respects equality of 
American citizenship, that had been at the basis of the 
country's entire political and social development. 

The presence of the negro race had always formed the 
one extreme and dangerous exception. The prohibition 



IMMIGRATION AND RACE QUESTIONS 79 

of the slave-trade, which took effect in 1808, must be re- 
garded not merely as due to scruples against an iniquitous 
traffic, nor alone as an admission of the fact that human 
slavery was objectionable, but must also be regarded as a 
far-sighted restriction upon immigration. It was definitely 
intended to build up a homogeneous society in America, 
and the presence of great numbers of negroes, quite apart 
from their status as slaves, would have been out of keeping 
with such aims and ideals. 

The prohibition of the slave-trade was, in its way, the 
precursor of the Chinese Exclusion Act which took effect 
about seventy-five years later. Unfortunately, the laws 
against the slave-trade were imperfectly enforced. The 
growth of cotton culture and the plantation demands of the 
South made the smuggling of slave cargoes very profitable 
and tempting, and the West Indies afforded a convenient 
rendezvous for this illegal traffic. Nevertheless, I will 
venture to express an opinion, perhaps a novel one, that the 
prohibition of the slave-trade was the most important of 
all public acts in the history of this country, from the 
standpoint of constructive policy in the development of our 
citizenship. For in spite of its imperfect enforcement, this 
prohibition made the slave-trade outlawed, piratical, and 
extremely hazardous, and in the main it was successful in 
its object. 

So great became the later demand for slave labor in our 
Southern states, that if the slave-trade had been left free 
and open, there is ample reason for thinking that the traffic 
from Africa direct, from the West Indies, from the Turkish 
Empire, and from all parts of the world where human beings 
were objects of barter and sale, would have expanded upon 
a very great scale. What the Constitution politely called 



80 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

"the migration or importation of such persons as any of 
the states now existing shall think proper to admit" 
would have gone on with ever increasing energy. When 
the New England sea captains had to give up the slave-trade, 
they brought white European laborers over to our Northern 
ports and sold them in the open markets to the highest bid- 
der for a term of years as the method of collecting their 
passage money. This influx of white people to the North 
would have been paralleled or outstripped by the great 
influx of negroes to the South. 

I am looking at the race problem in its fundamental 
aspects. Slavery under the American flag was bound to 
be self-limiting and temporary. Its abandonment did 
not depend in any manner upon the outbursts of anti- 
slavery sentiment in the North, nor upon the proclamation 
of freedom as a war measure. It would have been given 
up in due time as an obsolete form of human relationship. 
From the standpoint of the longer movements of history, 
the important thing was the importation of large numbers 
of people so alien in origin and characteristics as the negroes, 
irrespective of their earlier status. And the virtual end- 
ing of this form of immigration in 1808 is of incalculable 
significance to the subsequent course of American history. 
So great was the demand for more negroes in the forties 
and fifties that the repeal of the law of 1808 was openly 
demanded by representatives of the slave power ; and in the 
years just preceding the war the illicit slave-trade had 
undoubtedly assumed rather large dimensions. 

The conditions of the plantation system of the lower 
South and of the domestic slave-trade were not favorable 
to a very rapid increase of numbers. There were about 
1;200;000 slaves in the country in 1810, just after the 



IMMIGRATION AND RACE QUESTIONS 81 

suppression of the slave-trade. The number had doubled 
by 1840, and it reached nearly 4,000,000 in 1860. Since 
Southern representation in Congress allowed three-fifths 
of the slaves to be reckoned, there was no temptation to 
make the census figures too small. I do not hesitate to 
express the belief that if the slave-trade had remained open, 
there would have been at least twice as many slaves by 
the census of 1860, and probably as many negroes in the 
country then as there are now. The negro population 
would have vastly outnumbered the white throughout all 
the lower South, and the outlook for the future would have 
been something very different from that which now 
exists. 

'The abolition of slavery would have come, but it is 
probable that a number of the great states of the South 
would have remained permanently negro communities like 
San Domingo, Haiti, and Jamaica. The social difficulties 
that pertain to the Southern race situation will be serious for 
a long time to come. But it is probable that the worst of the 
political difficulties have now been met. The Constitution 
provides for a national, universal citizenship that includes 
the negroes, and these provisions will stand. Many negroes 
have come North, and their votes count in the balance 
between parties. The great necessity of the South was to 
find some way of restoring order and the appearance of 
legality, while putting political power — where it could 
best be exercised — in the hands of the white population 
during the period needful for negro training and develop- 
ment. Having disfranchised the negro first by intimida- 
tion and fraud, the Southern states, with only one or two 
exceptions, proceeded to disfranchise him by enactments 
providing educational and property qualifications, advance 



82 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

payment of poll taxes, and various discretionary powers 
vested in registration and election officers. 

Under the new provisions of the federal Constitution 
it is required that representation in Congress should be 
reduced m proportion to the number of citizens excluded 
from the franchise by any state. This mandate, however, 
could be put into effect only by acts of Congress recogniz- 
ing the facts and proceeding accordingly. But although 
Republican party platforms have from time to time de- 
manded a reduction of Southern representation, no serious 
attention has been given to the subject by Congress, and it 
is not likely that any steps will be taken to reduce Southern 
representation in the new apportionment of seats in the 
House that will follow the census of 1910. 

The solution as it stands is by no means unstatesman- 
like. Every negro citizen of the United States retains 
his theoretical political rights. In the South he does not 
at present exercise those rights except in certain districts or 
communities, such as eastern Tennessee. But, meanwhile, 
the negro has full opportunity to educate his children, and 
to work freely and securely at any trade or calling. The 
South is still poor, and it is with great effort and sacrifice 
that it can by degrees improve its very imperfect system of 
elementary education. The laws of the Southern states 
require an impartial per capita division of school funds 
between the two races. And although the negro schools 
do not in all cases actually receive their share of school 
money, the provision made for negro education by these 
states, in view of all the circumstances, is both generous 
and broad-minded. Negro illiteracy is gradually dimin- 
ishing, and economic progress is clearly perceptible. In 
the more prosperous cities and towns, school conditions 



IMMIGRATION AND RACE QUESTIONS 83 

have greatly improved for both races within recent years. 
By degrees there will develop a considerable element of 
conservative negro population, possessing intelligence, 
property, and character. And such negroes will probably, 
by common consent, come into actual exercise of their pres- 
ent theoretical rights as citizens. 

The North has gradually learned to recognize the inherent 
difficulties of the race situation, and to see the need of 
allowing the Southern states to work out their own prob- 
lems through the changes that can only come about with 
the passing of the years. The states which were so eager 
just before the war for the further unrestricted importation 
of African labor are now beginning to exert themselves to 
secure the importation of Italian and other elements of 
European white labor. 

One of the great recent constructive policies of the 
United States government has been directed toward the 
diversification and improvement of Southern farming. In 
Louisiana, Texas, and other Southern states, remarkable 
results have followed the scientific and practical demon- 
strations of the Department of Agriculture. While there 
is room for the negro in this improved farming, there is — 
even more importantly — a great and growing opportunity 
for the white man. In many regions where the plantation 
system once prevailed, the smaller farms, owned and suc- 
cessfully cultivated by white farmers of the Northern type, 
are multiplying rapidly. 

Furthermore, the development of manufactures through- 
out the South is bringing into existence the complex in- 
dustrial life which affords opportunities in many directions 
for an increased population, that can only be derived from 
European sources, since there is no available negro supply, 



84 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

even if negroes were more desirable than white men. The 
logic of the situation is that from this time forth the white 
population of the South is destined to grow very much more 
rapidly than the negro population. The advance of indus- 
try, wealth, and population will improve the general condi- 
tions of social and political life. Schools will be better 
supported, and the disorders illustrated by riots and lynch- 
ing will diminish as industrial society becomes more ad- 
vanced, and as police administration is more thoroughly 
organized. These disorders are, indeed, very deplorable, 
and they must be contended against by all the serious 
forces of politics and civilization. But it is philosophical 
to view them as transitional in their nature. 

There was a time when the negro population of the United 
States was almost 20 per cent of the total. This percent- 
age has been gradually diminishing until it was about 
11|- in the year 1900. If the present rate of immigration 
should continue, the negro percentage will have been 
reduced in the census of 1910 to about one-tenth of the 
whole population. 

The slavery system lifted perhaps one million Southern 
white people to the position of a favored class, and led to 
the neglect and relative decline of the South's most valuable 
possession, namely, its five or six millions of plain white 
people of old American stock, who had very little property 
and few advantages. For the great majority of the fom' 
million negroes, slavery meant an immeasurable improve- 
ment in their lot, when compared with their conditions 
in Africa. In any just estimate, the disadvantaged people 
— for whom the philanthropists and reformers of the North 
should have lifted up their voices — were not the slaves, 
but the disinherited and neglected mass of white population. 



IMMIGRATION AND RACE QUESTIONS 85 

It is slowly dawning upon the minds of the political 
leaders of the South that the redemption of their commu- 
nities lies in the full restoration and development of their 
own white population. The cotton-mill, the school, the 
improvement of agriculture, every agency of progress and 
civilization, must be invoked to make the poor whites of 
the South prosperous and intelligent. The progress that 
is now evident along all these lines represents the most 
important and transforming movement in American society 
and in fundamental conditions that the new century can 
show. The economic and social upbuilding of the Southern 
white population will bring about conditions attractive 
to white immigrants from Europe and the North, and the 
structure of Southern society will by degrees come to be 
similar to that of other regions where white men live and 
work on a high level of intelligence and democratic equality. 

The negro race will decline steadily in relative numbers, 
will remain socially distinct, and will be greatly improved 
by the sheer necessities of a situation that will subject it 
to a competitive struggle for existence. There will probably 
be some apparent tendency toward concentration of negro 
population in the so-called ''Black Belt" and other districts 
for a time; but the larger tendency will be toward a dis- 
persion of the race. Thus the most difficult social and 
political situation with v^'^hich we have had to contend in 
the formative process of building up our continental Amer- 
ican democracy will have been reduced to a fairly work- 
able solution, by the resistless dynamics of our onward 
movement. 

We had acquired a vast, favorable domain; we had 
created a free political system; we had opened wide our 
doors to the kindred nationalities of Europe, and the result 



86 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

was a new, composite nationality, with unity of language, 
with similarity of local institutions, with pervasive intelli- 
gence, with social and industrial mobility. A society thus 
constituted could not tolerate the disarrangements that 
would arise from a large Mongolian influx on the Pacific 
coast. Nor would it permit large fresh accessions of negro 
population from the West Indies or directly from Africa. 
But it can accept the burden imposed upon it through 
its own faults and errors of the earlier period. It can 
deal justly and in a helpful and loyal spirit with the negroes 
already here and with their children after them. Their 
presence will continue to be anomalous, but the difficulties 
arising from it will grow less critical and less baffling from 
this time forth. No single solution of a magical sort, but 
a host of less perceptible remedies all making for normal 
progress and national unity, will by degrees bring about a 
condition endurable for both races. 



IV 



PROBLEMS RELATING TO THE SETTLEMENT AND USE OF 
THE NATIONAL DOMAIN 

When the nation acquired the Western lands of Virginia 
and the other original colonies, it also assumed their Revo- 
lutionary War debts. From the standpoint of Alexander 
Hamilton and other constructive statesmen of that period, 
the assumption of the debts was more important than the 
acquisition of the lands, as a unifying measure. It was 
indeed expected that the Western settlements would develop 
rapidly, and bring new and important states into the 
Union, but the men charged with the problems of finance 
naturally thought of the Western lands as a lucrative asset 
and expected much from their sales in large tracts as a 
source of pubhc revenue. 

This anticipation was never, in fact, justified. The 
public lands have probably cost the government of the 
United States, from first to last, $150,000,000 more than 
they have brought into the treasury. It was realized by 
degrees that the public domain would have to be regarded 
as virtually free to those who were willing to go and live 
upon it and bear their share in overcoming the difficul- 
ties of frontier life. The land laws came to be looked upon as 
providing a method for regularizing the occupation of the 
land and for settling conflicts between rival claimants, 
rather than as a means of putting money into the national 

87 



88 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

exchequer. Pioneers and so-called "squatters" were con- 
stantly pressing well beyond the lines of the surveyed areas 
that were regularly opened to sale and settlement, and 
ways were almost invariably found to enable these fron- 
tiersmen, without undue hardship, to obtain legal title. 

Over the whole face of the land there was extended in 
legal theory a form of ownership vested in tribes of Indians. 
Before the government could regularly survey and open to 
sale a given district, the Indian title had to be extinguished 
through a treaty made with the chiefs or heads of the occu- 
pying tribe, which treaty in turn had to be ratified by the 
tribe itself on recommendation of the chiefs. This process 
involved in each case an arrangement for the occupation 
of other lands by the receding tribe, and usually a consider- 
able money payment besides. Thus, in the aggregate, very 
large sums of money were paid out by the national govern- 
ment in order to open the lands to white settlement. 

In addition there were the costs of surveying the land 
and of administering the arrangements for its orderly 
disposal. While no comprehensive system was at first 
adopted, the successive laws and rules for the disposal of 
fresh areas took on a similarity of essential features. 

Obviously, it was not to the advantage of new states and 
territories, most of whose lands still remained a part of the 
unsold national domain, that such tracts should be expen- 
sive or difficult to acquire. The new communities were 
eager for population and development. If the general 
government had held its land at a high price, settlement 
would have proceeded slowly. As a question in purely 
speculative politics, it would be interesting to consider 
what might have happened if the government had from 
the outset pursued a different policy with regard to its 



SETTLEMENT AND USE OF THE NATIONAL DOMAIN 89 

unoccupied domain. What really happened was the adop- 
tion of a policy that made the public lands virtually free 
in comparatively small tracts for actual settlers. 

By degrees there came to be attached to the arable 
public domain the conventional price of $1.25 an acre. 
This was to be looked upon as the settler's share toward 
extinguishing the Indian title and toward the actual ex- 
pense of surveying the land and giving him a recorded and 
guaranteed patent. It was by no mere accident, or through 
no argument for convenience in designating and selling the 
lands, that the six-mile-square township was adopted as 
the unit of land measurement when Congress first began 
to provide for distribution of its domain beyond the Ohio. 
The very name "township" was expressive of the expecta- 
tion that these surveyed squares of wilderness land would 
in due time, each for itself, become the territorial basis for 
a self-ordering neighborhood life. The township contained 
thirty-six sections, or square miles, and the quarter-section 
of one hundred and sixty acres came in due time to be 
regarded as the standard or average for the extent of a 
single farm or homestead. 

Thus almost from the beginning the doctrine that the 
public lands were an endowment for the benefit of the 
national treasury was abandoned. A very different theory 
took its place, namely, that the public domain was to be care- 
fully prepared, and distributed to actual settlers on terms 
so favorable as to encourage a rapid Western development. 
Methods were adopted that would tend to keep the lands 
from falling into the hands of large landed proprietors, and 
would, on the contrary, distribute them to farmers who 
would build up their own equal democratic commu- 
nities, while clearing the forests, making their homes, and 



90 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

creating their estates. This idea that Uncle Sam had land 
enough to give everybody a farm who would live upon it 
and occupy it, appealed very strongly to the imagination 
of the country in the middle part of the last century. It 
played a greater part in the development of our social and 
poHtical life than is generally remembered. 

It was not, however, a view that was welcome to the 
slave power of the South, because it had a tendency to 
build up the free farming states of the West more rapidly 
than the slave system could grow in its southwesterly 
empire. The Louisiana Purchase, as it turned out, had 
done far more to extend the system of free farming that 
had become standardized in the settlement of Ohio, Indiana, 
and Illinois, than to give new room for the expansion of 
slavery. This vast domain purchased from Napoleon was 
wedge-shaped, with the narrow end touching the Gulf of 
Mexico. Ail that slavery obtained from it was comprised 
in the area of the present states of Louisiana, Arkansas, 
and Missouri. Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and all that 
lay west and north of these were successfully claimed 
for the free farming system of the old Northwest. The 
destiny of Kansas was in doubt for a time, but the superior 
colonizing energy of the free farmers carried the day under 
the squatter-sovereignty struggle of the late fifties. 

It is true that the demand for additional slave territory 
had helped to secure the annexation of Texas; but this 
annexation had brought on the war with Mexico, which in 
its turn had led to the acquisition of California. And the 
discovery of gold on the Pacific coast had brought about 
conditions of settlement that precluded the slave system. 
Thus California was admitted to the Union without having 
gone through the probationary period of a territorial 



SETTLEMENT AND USE OF THE NATIONAL DOMAIN 91 

government ; and as Texas had come in with slavery as a 
preexisting system, so CaHfornia was admitted under its 
own constitution of 1849, forever prohibiting slavery. 

Meanwhile, our title to the Oregon country had been 
confirmed, and a territorial government had been erected 
in 1848, under conditions in every way favorable to the 
settlement there, as in California, of free farmers upon the 
great public domain. Even before this time the govern- 
ment had adopted the practice of granting two square 
miles in each surveyed township to the new state or ter- 
ritory for a permanent endowment of common schools. 
Thus in spirit and in practical working, the land policy 
of the United States had been designed to create free 
agricultural commonwealths in the Mississippi Valley and 
farther west; and their progress had obtained such head- 
way and momentum before the land hunger of the slavery 
sj^stem had become insatiate, that a preponderance had 
been obtained beyond all chance of reversal. 

It was this policy of public domain, in conjunction with 
our immigration policy and those conditions in Europe that 
had sent us millions of Irishmen and Germans previous to 
1860, that preserved the country for its original ideals of a 
free and homogeneous democracy. Such, however, was 
the strength of the compact influence of the pro-slavery 
elements in Congress, that it had never been possible to 
enact the broad, free homestead legislation for the whole 
public domain that had been strongly advocated for many 
years in the North and West. 

Such legislation quickly followed the withdrawal of the 
Southern states from the Union. The land legislation of 
1862 stands as a great monument in the history of Ameri- 
can development. While still permitting the native or 



92 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

naturalized citizen through actual occupancy to obtain title 
to one hundred and sixty acres of the public domain after 
a limited period of residence and the payment of $1.25 an 
acre (a system adopted in 1841), it further provided that 
the permanent homesteader who had built his house and 
cultivated his land in good faith, might at the end of five 
years obtain full and free title to his quarter-section farm 
without payment of the $200 or any other sum whatsoever. 

Under these liberal provisions, with some further addi- 
tions and modifications of the land system, the great 
Western prairies were settled as if by magic, when, at the 
end of the Civil War, the awakened energies of the nation 
were turned toward economic development. The restless 
energy of hundreds of thousands of young soldiers from 
the Confederate as well as from the Union armies found 
an outlet in the opportunity to go westward. The new 
land laws facilitated the most rapid possible settlement. 
The movement was further stimulated by an era of unpre- 
cedented railroad building, the new lines radiating in all 
directions from central Western points like Chicago and 
St. Louis. 

Almost from the moment of gold discovery in Cali- 
fornia, there had been a widespread agitation and dis- 
cussion of the possibility of overland railways to unite 
the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Several routes were pro- 
jected and partially surveyed in the decade before the 
Civil War. It was proposed to secure the construction of 
such roads through the granting of broad belts of public 
land, which would become valuable by reason of the means 
of access which the railroads would provide. 

Throughout all the Western states in the thirties and 
forties there had been a wild speculative furor for quick 



SETTLEMENT AND USE OF THE NATIONAL DOMAIN 93 

growth and aggrandizement. Billions of dollars' worth of 
canals and railroads had been projected on paper, and all 
forms of subsidy and public aid had become thoroughly 
familiar. The Western states as a rule had pledged their 
credit freely for the promotion of such new ways of com- 
munication, counties had issued bonds to secure railroads, 
townships and villages had subscribed, and Congress in a 
number of instances had conferred favors upon particular 
Western states by giving lands to promote transportation 
enterprises. 

Excessive enthusiasm for such undertakings had been 
largely responsible for the reaction that culminated in the 
panics of 1837 and 1857. In the settlement of a new 
country, speculation is inevitable. It is one phase of that 
buoyant optimism without which such difficulties as have 
been faced in the subduing of our American continent 
would have been prohibitive. 

In the outbursts of titanic energy necessary to the rapid 
opening up of the West, followed by successive periods 
of inevitable reaction, have been born very many of the 
political problems and controversies which have been pe- 
culiar to the life of the American people and which have 
marked the course of our pohtical and economic history. 
The South, which had not been favorable to a national 
free homestead policy, had also been consistently adverse 
to the development of the West through a policy of land 
subventions to transportation companies. New York had 
built her own Erie Canal ; and other enterprises for linking 
the East with the West had simply grasped at whatever 
aid they could secure, whether national, state, or local. 
But the breaking out of the war had emphasized the isola- 
tion of our Pacific coast country, and a Congress without 



94 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

Southern members and with a great Republican majority 
was ready promptly to subsidize not one transcontinental 
road merely, but as many as could bring forward serious 
claims to consideration. 

The first to offer were the Union Pacific, building westward 
from Omaha, and the Central Pacific, building eastward 
from Sacramento to meet this Omaha line. Congress 
granted these companies great loans in the form of gold 
bonds, and gave them some thirty million acres of land in 
addition. Their activity was further stimulated by an 
arrangement which left the point of meeting indefinite, 
and based the amounts of land and money subsidy upon 
mileage of construction actually achieved. This method 
resulted in the completion of a transcontinental line in 
seven years, whereas twice as long a period under other 
conditions would have been required. 

The high pressure, however, of such efforts — pressure 
financial and political as well — centered upon our public 
life at Washington, with results that blasted reputations 
and that helped to make honesty in public life itself a 
political issue embarrassing to our self-respect but too 
serious to be disregarded or covered up. 

This, however, from the larger view of history making, 
was only an incident. The building of the Pacific rail- 
roads and the lending of government credit, together with 
the use of railroad companies for inducing migration and 
distributing public land, were great substantive acts of 
public policy, magnificent in the largeness of their con- 
ception and, upon the whole, splendid and beneficent in 
their working out. The land grants to the Union and 
Central Pacific systems were followed by even more ex- 
tensive grants to the Northern Pacific and to the Southern 



SETTLEMENT AND USE OF THE NATIONAL DOMAIN 95 

Pacific, not to mention the great grant to the Atlantic 
and Pacific, and still other assignments of domain along 
the same policy. 

It was carefully arranged that, in the distribution of 
these lands, the homestead principle should be followed in 
so far as possible. In the aggregate, the grants to railroads 
reached something Hke two hundred million acres. These 
lands, however, were not given in continuous tracts, but 
in alternate square miles. Those not familiar with this 
colossal phase of the history of our nation-making will 
understand it if they have in mind any given township or 
six-mile-square tract falling within the zone of a railroad 
land grant. Eighteen of the thirty-six sections were assigned 
to the railroad company on an alternate checkerboard 
plan. Of the remaining eighteen sections, two were set 
aside for the benefit of the local school fund, and sixteen 
were further subdivided into four quarter-sections of one 
hundred and sixty acres each, to be open to settlement 
under the preemption and homestead laws. 

This method gave the government the opportunity of 
locating its homesteaders in the general belt served by a 
railroad line, while on the other hand it practically com- 
pelled the railroad to dispose of its lands in competition 
with the government, and made it certain that the bringing 
of population and settling of the country would be the 
governing motive. Thus the railroads became colonizers 
and immigration agents on a great scale. The rapid set- 
tlement of the western half of the Mississippi Valley in 
the twenty years following the war lay at the foundation 
of many problems which have had great significance in our 
public life, and some of which I must present more par- 
ticularly in subsequent chapters. 



96 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

Much of this territory rapidly settled was an open prairie 
country of rich soil and favorable climate, susceptible of 
very quick agricultural utilization under two important 
conditions, namely, that it be provided with railroads and 
with the capital necessary for farm operations. It was a 
country that could not be quickly developed without rail- 
roads to bring in the lumber necessary for building and the 
fuel necessary for winter use, besides manufactured sup- 
plies of all kinds. On the other hand the roads were 
equally necessary to transport the cereals and other farm 
products, that were destined for Eastern and European 
markets. It was under these conditions that the problem 
of railroad control had its origin in this country. A full 
understanding of the railroad question in our American 
political life has required the preliminary consideration 
of these problems of population and of domain, which 
have thus far occupied our attention. 

Furthermore, as I have remarked, the rapid develop- 
ment of Western agriculture required capital. A very 
small percentage of families which settled upon the public 
domain had means sufficient for more than a rude pioneer- 
ing start. In order to farm advantageously, it was needful 
to have buildings, fences, implements, and Hve stock. 
Surplus capital from the East and from Europe was drawn 
westward by high rates of interest and the assurance that 
farm mortgages were a safe kind of investment. Within 
a comparatively short period, an area which had been 
unoccupied, save for roving bands of Indians and herds of 
buffalo, became a factor in the production of the world's 
supply of food. Several hundred millions of bushels of 
cereals, each year, were moving eastward to compete with 
the farm products of the older states, or to be shipped to 



SETTLEMENT AND USE OF THE NATIONAL DOMAIN 97 

Europe. Every country in the world was profoundly 
affected. 

Farming became unprofitable in the East, and this fact 
stimulated the flow of population westward. The cheapen- 
ing of food products hopelessly deranged the relations 
between landlord and tenant in Ireland, created violent 
agrarian troubles, and increased the exodus from the Brit- 
ish Islands to America. On the European continent, the 
effect of American competition in supplies of bread and 
meat was so depressing that it similarly increased the out- 
ward flow of population, while leading to the erection of 
anti-American tariff walls. As for our new West itself, 
it could not wholly escape the pains and penalties of 
world-wide economic readjustment. Its free lands and 
rich soil brought new people constantly from the older 
agricultural regions which had suffered from the new 
competition. 

Thus the West became the victim of its own over-pro- 
duction. In bountiful years, prices were so low that the 
cost of railroad transportation became vital, and part of 
the corn crop had to be burned for fuel. In years of 
drouth or excessive rainfall, of grasshopper scourge, or other 
visitation of nature, it was impossible to pay interest upon 
the universal ten per cent mortgage. These conditions 
were making themselves felt in the period after the war, 
when the country was endeavoring to resume specie pay- 
ment. It was under similar conditions that the great silver 
movement of more recent years had its strength, if not 
its origin. 

When vast regions of a country are in the process of ma- 
turing a new agricultural and industrial life, through the use 
of capital borrowed from other regions, questions of money 



98 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

and currency come to have an almost life-and-death im- 
portance, if crops are bad and prices are low for a series of 
years. For the payment of interest and the repayment of 
principal become practically impossible; and the ques- 
tion is bound to arise whether the purchasing power of the 
nominal unit of value has in any manner been materially 
changed since the contract between debtor and creditor 
had been originally made. Thus the problems of money, 
currency, and banking, which have played so striking 
and pecuhar a part in American political life, have arisen 
through the sectional differences of economic condition 
brought about by our rapid westward movement. 

The European countries had within a hundred years 
passed through the rapid stages of economic development 
which have quadrupled their populations and changed 
them from old-time farming conditions to their present 
intense and complex industrial life. But they have not 
been troubled by questions of money and currency, as 
great popular issues. It has remained for the United States 
to take the abstractions of monetary science, and the 
technical forms of knowledge and erudition that belong to 
public and private banking systems, and make them the 
subject of political debate and passionate controversy in 
every village and every country school district throughout 
the land. It has all been a part of a valuable training 
in democratic self-government, and it has had a profound 
effect upon the character and course of our political life. 

The emergence of such issues in our politics has been 
solely due to the conditions of population and of domain 
which I have been endeavoring to describe. The necessity 
of dealing with such questions explains something that has 
puzzled the foreign student of our American system and 



SETTLEMENT AND USE OF THE NATIONAL DOMAIN 99 

that has not been always sufficiently clear to our own 
philosophers. This necessity has had results so far-reach- 
ing that I may be pardoned for a brief digression to dwell 
for a moment upon the significance of it. 

In England, it would not be considered possible at any 
given moment to name more than a handful of men capable 
of dealing effectively upon short notice with the problems 
that belong to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Yet 
the problems that present themselves for consideration to 
the American Secretary of the Treasmy, have a much 
wider range than those that must usually be faced by a 
European finance minister. Where a hundred men in some 
countries might be regarded as students of the varied 
theoretical and practical problems of money and currency, 
as related to public and private finance, we have many 
thousands in the United States who have arrived at con- 
victions upon almost every important phase of those 
abstruse and technical matters. 

Let it be granted that most of these people have read 
and thought superficially and crudely. Nevertheless we 
have a vast number of citizens who have been accustomed 
through many years to bring minds of great strength and 
ingenuity to bear upon the study of such questions. 
They have felt it necessary for them to understand a 
series of subjects that in Em'opean countries are relegated 
to experts, and that even statesmen and men of affairs do 
not as a rule trench upon, regarding them as they might 
think of certain abstruse questions of mathematics or 
astronomy. 

It is impossible to understand truly the course of Ameri- 
can politics until one has to some extent grasped the con- 
ditions under which practical necessity has affected the 

LOFC. 



100 POLITICAL PEOBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

training and intelligence of our citizenship. While it is 
natural enough that the drift of opinion through great 
regions of country should in the main coincide with self- 
interest, it is notably true that the very strength of political 
controversy, when such questions have been brought into 
our politics, has been due to the fact that on both sides 
essential justice has been considered the issue. 

In their earlier periods, the Western states, however 
diverse their elements of population, were simple in their 
economic and social structure, and rested wholly upon 
the basis of agriculture. While more devoid than any 
other equally prosperous communities in the world of a 
class of capitalists, or owners of realized wealth, they 
were on the other hand more free than any other com- 
munities of importance from the presence of a non- 
possessing or servile class. We had succeeded beyond the 
dreams of the most sanguine in creating on our arable 
lands, under the homestead system, communities — as in 
Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, the Dakotas — of 
average similarity of status. They were communities of 
a lower percentage of illiteracy than any others, and were 
more susceptible, probably, than any others to the play of 
public opinion. 

The conditions of life had given the slaveholding plant- 
ers of the South a training and an aptitude for politics that 
had been highly conspicuous through the period before 
the Civil War. And in turn, the conditions of Western 
farm settlement and life had for different reasons built up 
a series of communities which trained themselves to a 
zest and an aptitude for political questions and public life 
on the national plane. This must be appreciated in order 
to obtain a fair understanding of our political life since 



SETTLEMENT AND USE OF THE NATIONAL DOMAIN 101 

the year 1870. In clue time these sensitive, responsive, 
high-spirited populations that settled the arable states of 
the West after the Civil War, brought their communities 
up to a level of relative maturity. They had paid off their 
mortgages and had begun to develop a more varied in- 
dustrial life. The free lands of the arable Middle West 
had been disposed of, and the homestead and land system 
of the period following the war had been successful in 
its main objects. 

It was well known, from the earliest periods of explora- 
tion, that a wide stretch of country lying to the east of the 
Rocky Mountains was of limited rainfall, and that a part 
of it was so arid as virtually to constitute a desert region. 
But there was such variation of rainfall and of natural 
vegetation in different years that it required a generation 
of experiment, part of it extremely painful and disillusion- 
izing, to learn what were om' real economic problems of 
domain throughout a region several hundred miles in width 
and extending from the Canadian line to the Mexican bor- 
ders. The period of rapid settlement in the Dakotas, 
Nebraska, and Kansas happened to coincide with a decade 
of unusually abundant rainfall. Thus the margin of settle- 
ment on the homestead plan was pushed beyond the line 
of permanent safety. A succession of dry seasons drove 
back hundreds of thousands of settlers and destroyed not 
only a long north-and-south belt of homesteads, but also 
brought ruin and desertion to many flourishing railroad 
towns. 

It was learned that the semi-arid zone, while unsafe for 
standard American farming, was fai.-ly well adapted to 
grazing. Thus a vast area, covering from a quarter to a 
third of the whole territory of the United States, came to 



102 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

be regarded as suitable chiefly for cattle and sheep ranches. 
This condition was found to apply to the western parts of 
the states I have named, — the Dakotas, Nebraska, and 
Kansas, — and it pertained also to Montana, Idaho, 
Wyoming, parts of Washington and California, Utah, parts 
of Colorado and Nevada, New Mexico, and Arizona, as well 
as a great part of Texas. A reaction had followed the 
undue optimism of those who attempted to pursue ordinary 
farming in the areas of doubtful rainfall. Later in turn 
a serious reaction followed the speculative development of 
cattle ranching, where limited pasturage was easily ex- 
hausted, watercourses were few and far between, and 
winter conditions often extremely severe. 

In due time it came to be perceived that the old land laws 
did not properly apply to the Vast region of insufficient 
rainfall. In the arid and semi-arid belt, the water-supply 
is the chief public asset. The system of rectangular sur- 
vey of public lands in townships and sections and quarter- 
sections, and their absolute disposal under the preemption 
and homestead acts, which was admirable for a state like 
Iowa, did not suit the conditions of a state lying in the 
grazing belt. Those who were fortunate enough to locate 
their claims upon the watercourses were in a position to 
command for grazing purposes all the land that extended 
behind them for a considerable distance. It was perceived 
too late that the lands in the arid states should have been 
surveyed upon a different principle, the government retain- 
ing control of the watercourses, in order to give the holders 
of land on either side, to the utmost extent practicable, their 
reasonable use of the necessary water. 

Since conditions favored the cattle business on a large 
scale, rather than the system known as " stock-farming " 



SETTLEMENT AND USE OF THE NATIONAL DOMAIN 103 

on the smaller scale, the cattle companies were tempted to 
resort to various devices, some of them manifestly fraudu- 
lent, in order to obtain a monopoly of streams and water- 
ways, and thus to command the undisputed control of a 
great range of grazing hinterland for their flocks and herds. 
Meanwhile it was discovered by degrees that the arid lands 
were extremely productive where brought under irrigation. 
Gradually in California, and to a smaller degree in other 
states, private individuals and companies obtained control 
of local water-supplies and demonstrated the possibilities 
of irrigation farming and fruit culture. 

The states themselves were disposed to engage in such 
experiments, and to that end Congress granted a million 
acres of the arid public domain to each of these Western 
states in the year 1894. With much friction there was 
gradually coming about an adjustment of conditions among 
the great cattle producers, the homesteading farmers, the 
irrigation companies, and the other diverse interests of a 
vast empire containing more than a million square miles. 
In every one of the states concerned there had grown up 
a code of laws and regulations based upon the public im- 
portance and necessity of water. PoHtical and social 
problems wholly different from those of the arable and 
well-watered portions of the Mississippi Valley were being 
worked out by several million people of a highly energetic 
character, scattered throughout a great country which 
they were endeavoring to redeem and utilize. 

The greater part of the lands of these states and terri- 
tories remained undisposed of, and under control of the 
national government. The public lands thus remaining 
included not only the unwatered stretches of sage-brush 
plains, but the mountainous regions, with their upland 



104 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

belts of open timber or dense forest, including the head- 
waters of the streams and rivers. Western experience 
finally crystallized in the form of accepted views of wise 
public policy. Trans-Mississippi commercial congresses, 
irrigation conventions, and other agencies for the expres- 
sion of Western opinion began to make demands. And 
although the country could not accept the views that 
for a time prevailed with something like unanimity in those 
Western communities regarding the silver question, it 
began to see the justice of their views touching certain 
problems of the public domain. 

Accordingly there was adopted the principle of a per- 
manent public retention of the chief sources of water- 
supply, and in place of the old subsidies to railroads and 
other government measures for the settlement of the 
prairie states, a new system of vast importance was adopted 
by virtue of the so-called Reclamation Act which became 
a law in June, 1902. This act, which bore the name of 
Senator Newlands of Nevada, and which was in accord- 
ance with the most extended and profound of the recom- 
mendations contained in President Roosevelt's first message 
to Congress, constitutes one of those great culminating 
measures in the course of our constructive politics, that it 
is one of my chief purposes in these pages to designate 
and to interpret. 

The Reclamation Act itself was followed by an effort on 
the part of the existing administration to bring about a 
thorough revision of the land system of the country, in 
view of the fact that the remaining public lands were prac- 
tically all in the arid states. President Roosevelt, in his 
message of December, 1901, had summed up the pohcy he 
advocated in these general terms : " The reclamation and 



SETTLEMENT AND USE OF THE NATIONAL DOMAIN 105 

settlement of the arid lands will enrich every portion of 
our country, just as the settlement of the Ohio and Missis- 
sippi valleys brought prosperity to the Atlantic states. 
The increased demand for manufactured articles will stimu- 
late industrial production, while wider home markets and 
the trade of Asia will consume the larger food supplies and 
effectually prevent Western competition with Eastern agri- 
culture. Indeed, the products of irrigation will be con- 
sumed chiefly in upbuilding local centers of mining and 
other industries, which would otherwise not come into 
existence at all. Our people as a whole will profit, for suc- 
cessful home-making is but another name for the upbuild- 
ing of the nation." 

The general constructive policy of the President called 
for the protection of the Western water-supply by the 
creation of forest reserves, and the actual developing of 
irrigation farming by the creation of governmental irriga- 
tion works. This policy of national investment in irriga- 
tion enterprises was so radical that it frightened the 
Congressional leaders of both great parties, although it 
had found expression in the political platforms of the year 
1900. The Congressional rank and file, however, had been 
won over to the policy, and the Reclamation Act was car- 
ried as a non-partisan measure against the advice and the 
votes of the more conspicuous lawmakers. The act pro- 
vided that the proceeds of the sale of public lands in sixteen 
great areas, namely, thirteen states and three territories, 
dating from June 30, 1901, should no longer go into the 
treasury as a part of the general revenues, but should be 
set apart for irrigation purposes. 

The irrigated lands were to be disposed of in small tracts 
to actual settlers at a price large enough to cover fully the 



106 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

cost of creating and maintaining the costly engineering 
projects. The money was to be repaid in instalments ex- 
tending over a period of ten years more or less. The sums 
thus returned to the Reclamation Fund would be applicable 
to other engineering projects for further reclamation, and 
so on. 

It is not strange that conservative statesmen should have 
looked with some alarm upon so striking an innovation. 
They were willing to encourage the states and territories 
in the local promotion of irrigation enterprise, but doubted 
the wisdom of adopting a national policy of irrigation. 
First, they foresaw its difficulties from the standpoint of 
practical administration. Second, they were impressed 
with the argument that such a policy involved a build- 
ing up of Western agriculture at the expense of the 
nation, while Eastern agriculture was neglected and com- 
paratively unprofitable. They remembered some of the 
more immediate disturbances of economic balance due to 
the policy that had subsidized railroads and in every man- 
ner hastened the upbuilding of the so-called granger states 
of the Mississippi Valley. 

They failed to realize that the new reclamation policy, 
in the very nature of the case, could not operate rapidly 
enough to bring about such temporary disturbances of 
population and production, while from every standpoint the 
development of the arid states was an object of great con- 
cern. A number of these states had been admitted to the 
Union after a period of rapid development in the eighties 
which had created expectations that were wholly unful- 
filled in the decade following 1890. These so-called cow- 
boy states, with their scanty population and undeveloped 
conditions, had acquired an influence in the United States 



SETTLEMENT AND USE OF THE NATIONAL DOMAIN 107 

Senate that, when compactly exerted, either to obstruct 
legislation or to promote it, was bringing a new sectional 
force into our governmental affairs that was neither whole- 
some nor normal in its tendencies. 

The remedy for such a condition lay in the development 
of the latent resources of these states of mountain and 
desert, whose political conditions were in a state of violent 
local oscillation, at one moment exploited by cattle "kings," 
mining " kings," and railroad " magnates," at the next by 
populist orators, desperadoes in guise of labor leaders, or 
political demagogues. Tlie Reclamation Act is a single 
feature of a large new program of public policy for the 
normal and permanent development of these mining and 
grazing states. The Geological Survey was prepared with- 
out delay to locate the initial undertakings and to direct the 
service of reclamation. These first projects were wisely 
distributed throughout all the states and territories con- 
cerned ; and within less than five years more than 
$30,000,000 had been appropriated for projects which 
when completed would have cost more than $40,000,000. 

The fund will steadily increase under the so-called re- 
volving process, and it will in future be applied to larger 
and more difficult undertakings. In due time the resources 
of this fund will justify the creation of a series of dams for 
the storage of the flood waters that now go to waste in the 
rainy season. The land capable of irrigation is of unlimited 
extent, and, as I have already intimated, the problem of our 
Western domain is not a problem of land, but a problem of 
water. We have now committed ourselves to a construc- 
tive internal policy which would not have been possible in 
the earlier period of the Republic, and it will be productive 
of transforming results. In that earlier period we created 



108 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

prosperous democratic communities through the plan of 
disposing of the pubHc lands to settlers in quarter-section 
tracts. In the arid states our effort to dispose of lands 
under those same laws has had an effect opposite to that 
intended. 

Homesteads by the hundreds of thousands had been 
located fraudulently, to enable corporations and syndicates 
to control watercourses and thus to monopolize the use of 
vast areas of the public domain. The desert land law, 
which grants six hundred and forty acres to one person for 
irrigation purposes, enacted thirty years ago, had been open 
to similar abuse. A complete revision of the land system 
had become necessary in order to make it suit in a scien- 
tific way the conditions that existed. 

It is to be remembered that throughout the states of the 
arid or grazing belt, the greater part of the land area still 
belongs to the United States government. And it is 
probable that the government will retain permanently the 
ownership of hundreds of millions of acres. The grazing 
lands, which the great cattle companies have appropriated 
for themselves, and which they have parceled out by 
private understandings and agreements, with the indirect 
support and sanction of the state authorities and of state 
laws regulating the cattle and sheep industries, will in 
due time have been brought under a system of leasing. 

Some million of acres previously granted by Congress to 
the individual Western states are thus leased, notably in 
Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah. The extension 
of irrigation will be Hmited simply by the financial and 
engineering aspects of the great projects of the reclamation 
policy as these will develop in the future, the chief object 
of which will be the storage of water in the forest areas of 



SETTLEMENT AND USE OF THE NATIONAL DOMAIN 109 

the mountain slopes, in order to utilize it during those parts 
of the year when the streams naturally run dry. With this 
water conserved and used, the sandy desert would be as 
productive as the valley of the Nile, and lands now worth 
nothing more than a rental of a cent or two an acre for 
cattle ranges, would be worth a thousand dollars an acre 
for agriculture. 

In pursuance of this broad policy of public use of the 
great national domain, we are now moving far more rapidly 
than most people are aware toward a complete reversal 
of our old-time land system. In former times, it was the 
avowed object of the government to distribute its great 
domain to private owners as rapidly as possible. The coun- 
try as a whole was well wooded and its forest resources were 
deemed inexhaustible. The public ownership and adminis- 
tration of forests, whether for the sake of regulating the 
lumber supply, or for the better control of the sources and 
flow of rivers, were wholly foreign to American ideas. In 
the settlement of the East and of the Ohio country, the clear- 
ing away of dense encumbering forests was the chief burden 
and expense that the pioneer farmer had to undergo. 

The rapid settlement of the prairie states was made pos- 
sible by the existence of immense tracts of white pine tim- 
ber in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. One of the 
chief purposes served by the earlier railroad systems of the 
Northwest and the masses of Eastern capital sent for West- 
ern development was to be found in the transformation of 
those pine forests into a million houses in the prairie states, 
with the farm appurtenances of barns and fences. The 
destruction of those forest areas was at a rate in exact pro- 
portion to the rapid upbuilding of the prairie states. A 
certain compensation — unconscious, and unforeseen — 



110 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

was to be found in the planting of trees on prairie farms. 
In twenty or thirty years, trees attain a large growth in 
the rich prairie soil, and the landscape of states like Iowa 
has been completely transformed by the maturing of mil- 
lions of trees. 

While this is commendable, however, it does not consti- 
tute afforestation, or serve the peculiar purposes that ren- 
der forest tracts necessary to the well-being of the country. 
If the government had retained ownership of the white 
pine forests and had sold the standing timber on a scientific 
plan, the needs of prairie home-makers would have been 
served just as well, and the forests themselves would have 
remained, yielding a perpetual supply of lumber, and mean- 
while conserving and regulating the flow of rivers. The 
American Forestry Association came into being at a 
fortunate time to give focus and direction to a growing 
intelligence upon the subject of the management of the 
remaining forest areas of America. 

Certain of the states, notably New York, adopted a forest 
policy based principally upon the permanent retention by 
the state of lands in the Adirondack forest which had been 
cut over by lumbermen and were forfeited through non- 
payment of taxes. By 1890 the New York forest reserve 
had grown to the dimensions of about a million acres. It 
was through such action, and the gradual advance of public 
opinion, that many renewed attempts to induce Congress to 
enter upon a national forestry policy were at length re- 
warded in 1891. It is frequently the case in public affairs 
that after the failure of careful and elaborate proposals, a 
policy of immense consequence is brought into effect by 
some incidental enactment scarcely noted at the time. 

In 1873 Congress had passed the Timber Culture Act. 



SETTLEMENT AND USE OF THE NATIONAL DOMAIN 111 

It allowed the homesteader to secure an additional one hun- 
dred and sixty acres on condition of planting a part of it 
successfully in forest trees. It was conceived in total igno- 
rance of the principles of forestry, and was a complete 
failure except from the standpoint of individuals who 
desired a pretext for acquiring valuable lands in their 
neighborhood. In 1891 this Timber Culture Act was very 
properly repealed. As an amendment to the simple 
measure of repeal, it was proposed: "That the President 
of the United States may, from time to time, set apart and 
reserve, in any state or territory having public lands bear- 
ing forests, any part of the pubHc lands wholly or in part 
covered with timber or undergrowth, whether of commercial 
value or not, as public reservation, and the President shall, 
by public proclamation, declare the establishment of such 
reservations and the limits thereof." 

Under this provision, the movement went steadily for- 
ward until within a period of fifteen years, up to the end of 
the fiscal year 1906, forest reserves had been set apart to 
the number of one hundred and six separate tracts, embrac- 
ing one hundred and seven million acres. The extent of 
these reserves was thus greater than the whole of New 
England, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, 
and Virginia. The policy was endangered in its earlier 
years through Western opposition due in part to a mis- 
understanding of its nature and in part to the pressure of 
private interests, and conflicts arising from imperfect ad- 
ministration. But successive Presidents showed enlightened 
views and followed scientific counsels. Proper legislation 
was adopted for the administration of the forest reserves, 
and the policy became established beyond danger of serious 
reversal, although Presidential power was lessened in 1907. 



112 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

These great areas and their lumber resources are small as 
compared with the vast tracts of American forest that are 
privately held and that are under profitable exploitation 
by the so-called "lumber kings," who were, in 1906, charged 
with having formed a trust and established monopoly 
prices. Such conditions merely gave further impetus to 
the movement for the reservation of government areas of 
timbered land, which — by virtue of additional proclama- 
tions by President Roosevelt — embraced 127,000,000 acres, 
or 200,000 square miles, at the beginning of 1907. This 
is just equal to the area of the whole of France. It is 
almost twice the area of the kingdom of Italy. 

The government is developing an administrative service 
that will be competent to administer its immense forest 
domain for various objects of common welfare. The main- 
tenance of the forests is vital to the advantageous use of 
the people who occupy the lands of the lower regions which 
derive their water from the wooded uplands. Although 
the subject is a tempting one, it is not my pm'pose to fore- 
cast the elaborate economic development that must result 
from the present and prospective forest policy of the 
government. 

Experience acquired in the management of the resources 
of large Indian reservations has forced the government to 
study and administer methods of leasing grazing lands, of 
selling standing timber to lumber companies, and of grant- 
ing mining privileges to coal companies and other corpora- 
tions. Gradually these experiences have prepared the way 
for a great and permanent national policy under which 
many hundreds of millions of acres of the public domain 
will be permanently retained and administered, our govern- 
ment thus becoming a landlord upon a scale of magnitude 



SETTLEMENT AND USE OF THE NATIONAL DOMAIN 113 

that very few practical men would have deemed possible 
until very recently. 

A phase of this movement had illustration in President 
Roosevelt's order (1907) withdrawing from further disposi- 
tion to private owners all the public lands which had been 
indicated by the Geological Survey as containing deposits 
of coal. The area of such lands was estimated at about 
fifty milHon acres. This temporary order of the President 
was followed by a carefully prepared bill, providing 
for the permanent reservation of lands estimated at one 
hundred million acres in extent, on account of their rich- 
ness in petroleum, coal, and various minerals. Senator 
Nelson's bill, which represented the views of the President 
and of the experts of several administrative departments, 
provided methods for leasing these lands, and at the same 
time attempted to guard against monopoly, or combination, 
or unreasonable prices in the sale by the lessee of the oil, 
coal, ores, or other products of the public land thus reserved. 

Here then is another area of extent greater than a Euro- 
pean kingdom, to be held by the government in order that 
its resources of mineral wealth may be developed for the 
general good. It is easy now to see that if the value 
of such a poHcy had been appreciated in an earlier period, 
particularly as respects coal lands, great public benefit 
would have resulted. It is not long since the iron ore lands 
of Minnesota and the Lake Superior region were a part of 
the public domain. They passed to private ownership 
through a misapplied use of the existing land laws, with 
no compensation to the government or the public. Yet 
with scarcely any lapse of time, those iron ore lands are 
valued at sums which in the aggregate would probably 
reach a thousand million dollars. Colossal private fortunes 



114 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

have already resulted from their exploitation, and they 
have come under a monopoly control which levies a per- 
manent tax upon the entire country in the cost of iron and 
steel products. 

It is obvious that the government should have retained 
those mineral lands, just as it should have retained its coal 
lands, selling the ore to those who needed it, upon a 
simple system of leasing and royalties. The government 
will henceforth be selling standing timber to lumbermen, 
water power for electrical transmission, water for irrigation 
rights, and oil, coal, and mineral privileges, on an ever 
increasing scale of magnitude, while it will rent grazing 
lands equal in extent to the greater part of the country 
east of the Mississippi River, 

All this change from the policy of private ownership to 
the policy of landlordism and collectivism on a great scale, 
in the management of the public domain, signifies no change 
whatever in the spirit or purpose of our American democ- 
racy. Our principle from the beginning has been a construc- 
tive one. Our government has always definitely occupied 
itself with the task of creating a great nationality. In the 
diversity of physical and cHmatic conditions, we have had 
to change our laws and administrative methods in order to 
achieve the building up of true American communities in 
the vast regions of mountain and plain and unequal rain- 
fall, extending from Western Nebraska to the Sierras. 
The principles of democratic equality and personal initia- 
tive will not be destroyed by this new policy, but, on the 
contrary, will be promoted and kept alive. 

The new policy has had to await the advance of scientific 
knowledge, the development of administrative efiiciency 
and skill, the growth of capital for the conduct of large 



SETTLEMENT AND USE OF THE NATIONAL DOMAIN 115 

enterprises, and a general maturing of the country. Associ- 
ated with this rapidly developing new policy in the admin- 
istration of the public domain will be found the political 
discussion and treatment of various economic problems, 
such as the regulation of railroads and interstate com- 
merce, the extension of government ownership and opera- 
tion to certain services in which the public has a large 
interest, and the perfection of various parts of our political 
and governmental machinery. 



PROBLEMS OF THE FRANCHISE, PRACTICAL PARTICIPATION 
IN POLITICS, AND THE WORKING OF PARTIES 

The fundamental object of the political life of a people 
is to secure general harmony and well-being in human 
relationships. The contentions of politics may seem in- 
tense and even bitter at times, yet in a country whose 
development has been favorable and fortunate, the matters 
of agreement and accord should be so great and substantial, 
when compared with the matters of difference and of clash, 
that the play of controversy can be kept within safe 
limits. 

As I have endeavored to make emphatic in the preceding 
pages, the controlling purpose of our development through 
more than a hundred years has been to create a series of 
conditions of population, of citizenship, and of opportunity 
with respect to the land and natural resources of a new 
country, that would make for unity and harmony. The im- 
migration problem in its present and future aspects must 
be dealt with from this standpoint. For so long a time as 
experience may show that fresh relays of immigrants can 
be admitted without disturbing in any serious manner the 
blending and unifying process which tends to make the 
American population homogeneous, the doors will remain 
open. That is to say, a population using the same lan- 
guage, having the same average degree and kind of educa- 

116 



THE CITIZEN AND HIS PART IN POLITICS 117 

tion, mingling freely in all pursuits and callings, and showing 
no marked tendency to crystallize into classes or to become 
segregated in localities, will require no checks upon immi- 
gration except such as are in the nature of orderly and 
wholesome regulation. 

I have drawn upon our experience with the race question 
in the South in order to show how two kinds of political 
problems of the extreme and dangerous sort may be brought 
into the life of a nation, — the one economic, the other 
racial. The toleration of slavery created rival economic 
systems that interfered with the normal play of political 
forces. Under such conditions there was lacking that 
stable equilibrium, due to a general agreement about fun- 
damental things, which makes ordinary political contro- 
versy a harmless outlet for energy, and even a useful instru- 
ment of progress. 

The abolition of slavery ended the radical, underlying 
antagonism of economic systems, that had intensified 
poHtical differences touching concrete questions, such as 
nullification of federal laws by states, the return of fugitive 
slaves, the settlement and government of the Western lands, 
the tariff, and so on. Even after the slavery system was 
ended, there remained a series of transitional economic 
problems, abnormal in their sectional aspects, due to the 
labor conditions following emancipation. 

Far more serious, however, as I have previously shown, 
than the economic controversies in our political life due 
to the development of the Southern slavery and plantation 
system, has been the discord arising from the extreme 
divergence of racial type and social condition between 
the white and negro populations of the Southern states. 
Where such differences exist, political life works under 



118 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

conditions of dangerous tension, as through the Reconstruc- 
tion period following the war, and in more recent mani- 
festations of the race problem. 

Thus we have learned by experience that in the process 
of nation-building we must, in so far as possible, guard 
against the creation of permanently discordant conditions, 
whether racial or economic, on a scale great enough to en- 
danger the general harmony of our future political hfe. 
It is upon considerations of this kind that the philosophical 
statesman must justify measures to prevent the migration 
of large bodies of Asiatic workmen to our Western states. 
Their presence must mean both economic and racial 
antagonisms that would cause the political pendulum to 
oscillate too violently. 

I have endeavored, furthermore, to show that recent 
policies looking to the permanent retention in government 
hands of immense areas of forest land, mineral land, 
and grazing land, have had as their object the far-reaching 
purpose of building up stable, democratic communities, 
preventing extreme inequalities of social and economic 
status, and avoiding the further development of undesir- 
able conditions that would in time have created permanent 
sectional differences and given a dangerous intensity to cer- 
tain political problems. 

We have perceived that whereas party and pohtical 
differences in Europe have been due in great part to the 
struggle of the masses against the classes, we have been 
steadily striving in this country to prevent conditions that 
might lead to the formation of classes. At the same time 
we have been trying to harmonize differences arising in the 
process of the westward movement and the development 
of new areas. Differences between the East and the 



THE CITIZEN AND HIS PART IN POLITICS 119 

middle West disappeared with the maturing of the Mis- 
sissippi Valley. No trace of sectional character remained 
— as between Massachusetts and Illinois, for example — 
in the alignment of parties or the practical issues of 
politics. 

In short, it is the business of statesmanship in a develop- 
ing country so to control the factors of nation-building as 
to secure a constantly diminishing field for the play of po- 
litical controversy. It has not been many years since the 
chosen leader of a great national party, at the height of a 
Presidential campaign, declared that he had come into " the 
enemy's country" when he took the platform in the state 
of New York. A single decade has brought about a vast 
change in the sectional feeling that then prevailed. The 
natural course of business development, together with the 
fortunate operation of public policies, has removed one 
subject after another from the field of sharp and extreme 
political controversy. Thus great strength has been added 
to that general foundation of harmony and social content, 
to establish which is so prime an object in the political 
life of a nation. 

As I have endeavored to show, the elements of prog- 
ress now at work will from this time forth bring Southern 
political life into a more normal condition. By degrees 
those more dangerous phases of the race problem that have 
not merely dominated the political life of the Southern 
states themselves, but have affected indirectly the higher 
politics of the nation, will be outgrown and will disappear. 

Thus we have been building our Ship of State for per- 
manence, for safety, and for steadiness of average move- 
ment. The elements of human nature cannot be greatly 
changed. The winds will blow from prevailing quarters, 



120 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

and the storms will rage in their seasons. But if the build- 
ers well understand what conditions the ship must meet, 
they may minimize the risks. We shall never have a 
perfect ship of state, nor can we expect long periods of 
ideal weather in our political life. But we can be con- 
stantly improving the ship, and minimizing the disadvan- 
tages and dangers due to variations of wind, weather, and 
tide. 

I cannot dwell too strongly upon this consideration as 
one that should be kept clearly in mind both by students 
of our political history and also by those who participate 
in our political life from public-spirited motives. For it is 
consoling to believe that every time an impending evil is 
averted by preventive statesmanship, or an existing evil 
is cured or arrested in its progress by some timely applica- 
tion of remedies, there is solid ground gained and perma- 
nent improvement made, with a resultant shrinkage of 
the bounds of controversy. 

So long as there is a' pervading intelligence in the body 
of citizenship, there can be no danger of the kind of har- 
mony that would suggest stagnation or decay. It is not 
harmful to arrive, now and then, in the progress of a 
nation, at periods termed in American political parlance 
''eras of good feeling," when, along with a high degree of 
confidence in the ability, effectiveness, and good faith of 
those charged with official duties, is to be found a disposi- 
tion to lay aside political controversy and dwell upon points 
of agreement rather than upon points of difference. In the 
nature of things, such periods cannot last very long, but 
they serve some useful purposes. 

There is a wide range of political and governmental work 
to be done that requires diligence and skill and disinterested 



THE CITIZEN AND HIS PART IN POLITICS 121 

public spirit. And in periods when the flame of contro- 
versy burns low, it often happens that excellent political 
progress is made in a spirit of candor and cooperation, 
through the united efforts of men who have more usually 
spent their energies in the strife of parties. I am firmly 
of the opinion that these periods of comparatively smooth 
seas and bright skies can be rendered more frequent in 
their recurrence and longer in their duration. 

But to that end we must continue to follow two 
main lines of constructive policy in our further work as a 
nation. One of these lines I have sufficiently indicated in 
my illustrations of the means we have taken thus far to 
create unity in om' citizenship, through the building up of 
a blended and homogeneous American type, with absolute 
faith in democracy, and with unlimited stress upon the 
education and training of the children as factors in political 
and social life. The other line of policy is of the subjective 
rather than the objective kind and has to do less with 
laws and with measures employed by the government in 
the shaping of its citizenship than with the democracy 
itself in its attempts to maintain its own efficiency and to 
make its organs of government responsive to its will. 

For, as I have said repeatedly, it is the great business 
and concern of government to look ahead and shape its 
citizenship aright; while it is the business of the citizens 
constantly to perfect and improve the government either 
in the details of its structure or in the quality and efficiency 
of its law-making and its administrative work. I wish 
at this point to dwell upon this relation between the 
people and the government as of itself in this country con- 
stituting, when viewed in its entirety, one of the greatest, 
if not the very chief, of our political problems. 



122 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

Consider what the government does to create the 
citizen body. It has provided the landed domain and the 
various means of a constitutional and legal sort for main- 
taining equality of economic, social, and political oppor- 
tunity. It has controlled the conditions of migration with 
a view to the essential solidarity of the people who owe it 
their allegiance. It has set up a standard of national, 
universal suffrage, the state governments being allowed to 
modify the standard within reasonable limits. It has 
allowed the foreigner to become naturalized upon easy con- 
ditions, and it has given the states a wide range of liberty 
in their efforts to create conditions favorable to the growth 
of communities capable of wise self-direction. 

The government has attached so much importance to the 
status of citizenship, that it has tried to safeguard the 
humblest laborer, in order to improve his standard of liv- 
ing, and to save his dignity as an equal member of the 
great body of freemen. Government mediates between 
capital and labor to an ever increasing extent, not merely 
to protect the larger public from the inconvenience of 
strikes and labor disputes, but to aid constantjy in the 
process of improving the conditions of labor, in order to 
sustain the standards of American citizenship. 

Through a long series of progressive steps, government 
has improved the social, economic, and political status of 
women. As teachers in the schools, they now constitute 
the most important body of public servants in the employ- 
ment of the state. In many of the states they are en- 
titled to vote in school elections, in other states in municipal 
elections, and in a few states they have obtained the full 
political franchise. 

The underlying object has been to secure a high condi- 



THE CITIZEN AND HIS PART IN POLITICS 123 

tion of democratic society. Women, as well as men, must 
be enlightened and capable of a part in organized social 
life. Government expects them, in the home and in 
the school, to supply the most important part of the 
training of its future citizens. And as I have said again 
and again, the chief business of constructive pohtics 
is to make sure of the future through the training of the 
young and the transmission of ideals. The enlightened 
modern government, therefore, spares no effort to fit its 
women for their paramount duty in this regard. 

It becomes a question of experimental detail, whether 
women assist in the carrying on of the mechanical tasks of 
government, or whether they leave the business of voting 
and ofhce-holding to men. Social organization becomes 
ever more intricate as civilization advances. There are 
many forms of activity, some of them comparatively new, 
in which women can advantageously occupy their increas- 
ing margin of leisure and freedom. Thus far, it seems to 
be the prevailing view that there is social and political ad- 
vantage in leaving to men the more formal errands and 
functions of politics, in order to avoid duplication of effort 
and to reserve to women a greater freedom for those even 
more important domestic and social activities that are at 
present regarded as their necessary sphere. 

In a community where the forces of public opinion are 
working in a somewhat ideal way, the voters on election 
day can — in the nature of the case, speaking in average 
terms — merely register the social will. Going to the polls 
under such circumstances constitutes a family errand. In a 
normal society based upon freedom and intelligence, the 
most convenient and effective machinery of government 
becomes simply a matter of experiment. Unquestionably, 



124 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

it is the object of government to develop the social and 
public capacity of women as well as of men, and when all 
adults are so trained as to be fit for the suffrage and for 
eligibility to office, it will come to be a less rather than a 
more important question, precisely how the electorate is 
made up. 

It is necessary in our democratic state so to adjust con- 
ditions and to provide opportunities as to enable every 
individual to exercise all the social and political influence 
of which he or she may be capable. In this way, pubUc 
opinion is built up; and such public opinion, based upon 
intelligence and character, will find a way to put its deter- 
minations into effect. 

There is nothing absolute or final, therefore, in the pre- 
vailing rule which gives the political franchise to male 
voters above the age of twenty-one, merely excluding crimi- 
nals and vagrants. In the earlier days of the Republic, 
the more conservative people were afraid of unrestricted 
suffrage, and desired to confine political enfranchisement 
to those who were manifestly respectable and competent, 
— the possessors of property, the heads of families, the 
members of churches, and so on. 

But with the nationalizing of the American type in the 
westward sweep of pioneering progress, came the spirit of 
confidence in the people, and — what was a wholly new 
thing in the world — the belief in something like univer- 
sality of intelligence and character, and in equality upon 
a high level. Thus, unrestricted male suffrage prevails 
throughout the country with exceptions notable only in 
the addition of woman suffrage in Colorado and other 
Western states, and the exclusion of negro illiterates in 
the South, 



THE CITIZEN AND HIS PART IN POLITICS 125 

The exclusion of illiterates in Massachusetts represents 
fastidiousness rather than important statesmanship. The 
essential thing in Massachusetts is the true statesman- 
ship of its advanced educational system, its laws ex- 
cluding children from factories, and its attempts to throw 
safeguards around the employment of women. 

As for the exclusion of negro illiterates in the South, it is 
to be treated as a policy looking in the end toward a real 
enfranchisement. A dominant and resistless determination 
on the part of the white population of the South had ex- 
cluded the negroes altogether from participation in poli- 
tics, except in a few localities, and the negroes had in prac- 
tice accepted the situation. But the negro still possessed 
the theoretical right to vote, and there was instability and 
constant danger in a situation brought about and sus- 
tained illegally, that offered peculiar temptation to dema- 
gogues in times of factional controversy between elements 
of the white population. 

Thus, the legal disfranchisement of negro illiterates 
paved the way for a more stable political condition in 
the South, and gave opportunity for the gradual building 
up of a normal public opinion and a proper play of politi- 
cal life among the citizens of the dominant race. When, 
after another decade or two, the political life of the white 
voters of the South has reasserted itself in a wholesome 
way, the negroes who possess fitness will undoubtedly 
be admitted to the exercise of their legal political rights 
by the voluntary action of their white neighbors. 

The acquisition of the franchise by the emancipated 
slaves of the South was abnormal, and it came about 
through the exercise of a power that was extraneous 
and arbitrary. To be useful or permanent, the exercise of 



126 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

political privilege must find its local and inherent reasons. 
The negroes of the South will never arrive at a valuable 
exercise of the franchise until they come into it upon their 
recognized merits as useful members of their local com- 
munities, and are invited into it by their white neighbors. 

So much for the conditions of citizenship as the state 
ordains and provides. But, even as the state makes the 
citizens, so the citizens in turn must make the state ; that 
is to say, they must keep the government effective, and 
responsive to their real purposes and wishes. And to 
understand how this is done in practice, we must consider 
two elaborate sets of machinery, the one set official and 
the other voluntary. 

The voluntary machinery consists of the more permanent 
organization of poHtical parties, and the more temporary or 
special groupings and associations of citizens for particular 
or local political purposes. The official machinery consists 
first, of the government of the United States, regarded as a 
"going concern"; that is to say, of its legal structm'e and 
its personnel of several hundred thousand officials, from the 
President in the White House to the letter-carrier or the 
apprentice-boy on a warship. Then comes the machinery 
for the government of the states, the government of the 
counties, that of incorporated cities, towns, and villages, 
and that of country townships and of road and school 
districts. 

When we look at politics from the voluntary side, it is 
best perhaps to begin with the presidential campaign as the 
culminating point in what an able student of our system 
describes as our "quadrennial political cycle." When, on 
the other hand, we study political mechanism on the official 
side, there are some advantages in beginning with the 



THE CITIZEN AND HIS PART IN POLITICS 127 

smaller units of self-government and administration. It is 
obvious that the voluntary political structure cannot be 
understood at all unless one has somewhat clearly in mind 
the characteristics of the official mechanism. 

As I have already stated, it is no part of my plan to 
dwell upon the formal structure or operation of our gov- 
ernment. But there are some characteristics of it that we 
must keep in mind in order to appreciate the nature of 
certain problems with which the political Ufe concerns itself. 

We have always been a very busy nation, and, upon 
the whole, a sober-minded one. But our people have been 
buoyant, hopeful, and of resilient spirit, and they have 
found in politics many of the features of a great national 
game, besides finding opportunity for the play of ambition 
and for the achievement of distinction. In countries where 
the primary objects of modern political life are not fully 
achieved, — that is to say, where democracy is still fight- 
ing its battle against aristocracy and intrenched privi- 
lege, — it is impossible in the nature of the case for political 
life to assume as it does in the United States the stimulat- 
ing and exciting qualities of a pubhc diversion, into which 
men may enter in a spirit of competition that is in its main 
aspects neither dangerous nor unwholesome. 

But a more important explanation of many of the phe- 
nomena of our political life is to be found in the training and 
opportunity given by the government of our smaller political 
units. We have several thousand counties in the United 
States, each with its governing board of supervisors, its 
sheriff, its treasurer, its auditor, its superintendent of 
schools, and its other officers. If we have, say, 4000 coun- 
ties, we have perhaps 50,000 or 60,000 townships, each with 
its elective board or group of officials ; and we have a far 



128 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

greater number of school districts and road districts which 
in most parts of the country elect their public servants 
by popular vote. When one makes reckoning of the villages 
and the larger municipal corporations, and attempts to find 
out how many people are officially serving their fellow- 
citizens in elective offices under our political system, it 
would be conservative to estimate that there must be 
considerably more than a million. 

For every fifteen or twenty voters, there must be upon 
the average at least one man who holds a position to which 
he has been chosen by the votes of his fellow-citizens, and 
who may rightly feel that he is in a place of public trust 
and has achieved some local distinction. What all this 
means in our political life is better understood when one 
brings it into comparison with conditions as they have 
hitherto existed in England, for example. 

Until very recently the opportunity for the ordinary citi- 
zen in England to serve his fellow-men by holding public 
office, or to gratify his ambition by entering political life, 
was extremely limited. A few men, very favorably placed, 
might hope to enter the House of Commons. In the larger 
towns and cities, a few might be elected to membership in 
municipal councils. There was practically nothing else. 

Under recent legislation there are elective county coun- 
cils in England and elective parish councils correspond- 
ing somewhat to our township boards. In the course of 
another generation, the opportunity to serve upon these 
local boards will have marked effect upon the political life 
of England. But hitherto the whole spirit of English 
political life has been aristocratic. There has been no such 
thing as the regular holding of elections, except for members 
of municipal councils. And the great complicated structure 



THE CITIZEN AND HIS PART IN POLITICS 129 

of popularly worked political machinery has been prac- 
tically unknown. 

It would be impossible to overestimate the influence 
upon our actual political life of the opportunities afforded 
by the existence, for example, of fifty governorships of 
American commonwealths, along with the other elective 
state offices of dignity and influence, and the numerous 
judiciary positions, elective in most of the states and carry- 
ing with them great consideration. In its practical work- 
ing, the system has had a marvelous effect in stimulating 
effort and developing capacity in the ordinary citizen. 

In European public life the opportunities are too few 
and the gradations too severe for the ordinary citizen, 
who, in consequence, can seldom hope to leap across the 
broad gulf that separates private from public life. But 
with us it is wholly different. With a million or more of 
elective offices, and the tradition of rotation in such places, 
every ambitious boy may be able to secure a fair test of his 
political aptitudes. He may not merely join the torch- 
light processions, attend the barbecues, applaud the ora- 
tors, and come under the spell of party rivalry in heated 
national campaigns, but he may find himself useful and 
in due time important in that local fraction of the party 
that is representative of voluntary political life for his 
township, or village, or city ward, or voting precinct, while 
he may also make his way into official place and rank 
through the opportunities afforded by the political structure 
of the smaller governing units. 

In his political life, both on the voluntary side and on 
the local official side, he becomes acquainted with the par- 
hamentary forms under which political meetings are con- 
ducted, and he acquires the ability to stand upon his feet 



130 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

and argue for his public views, whether upon the manage- 
ment of local roads and schools, or upon the national tariff, 
the control of railroads, or the relation of the Monroe Doc- 
trine to the acquisition of the PhiHppines. 

In performing the simple functions of a township 
treasurer or of an elected assessor of property for pur- 
poses of taxation, he acquires a certain training and 
capacity as respects the problems of public finance that 
in thousands of instances have a remarkable educational 
effect, when taken in conjunction with the habit of carrying 
our national problems of taxation, finance, money, and 
banking, into popular discussion. The practice of financial 
administration in townships, municipalities, and counties 
— aided by the habitual discussion of larger financial 
problems, either as party questions or as a matter of intel- 
lectual diversion — have given us a set of capable citizens 
in almost every county and smaller community in the 
United States, who could be translated into high office 
and positions of great authority, with the reasonable cer- 
tainty that they would show fairly good judgment, main- 
tain proper dignity, and quickly grasp the more technical, 
as well as the more general, duties of a state treasurership 
or a position in the national government. 

The young citizen showing aptitude and trustworthy 
qualities in his township or village may become a factor 
in the government of his county; then a member of the 
state legislature; and thus he may go forward upon his 
merits and abilities to the higher places of state and national 
life. Along with the opportunities readily in reach of hun- 
dreds of thousands, even millions, of citizens afforded by 
the multiphcation of local elective and appointive oflices, are 
also to be reckoned the opportunities for influence, power, 



THE CITIZEN AND HIS PART IN POLITICS 131 

and diversion afforded by the non-official organizations, 
built up through the voluntary association of citizens for 
the choice of candidates, the formulation of poUcies, and 
the effective control of the official machinery. 

This vast compHcated double system of political Hfe makes 
its strong appeal to almost every citizen of the land from 
one motive or from another. Americans are preeminently 
political animals, with a fondness for organization; and al- 
most every healthy citizen feels the attraction of politics as 
a diversion, — a great continuing game, with its national, 
its state, and its local phases, its great culminating periods 
every four years, extending from the national conventions 
of June or July, to the elections of the following November, 
— an exciting pursuit that is followed with less intensity 
through the succeeding years, with its state and local objects, 
until the quadrennial cycle is completed and the Presiden- 
tial year again comes around. 

To most citizens this great game is fascinating if only as 
a form of social diversion, appealing to the universal in- 
stinct for politics. To very many the political life makes 
appeal through the motive of ambition, success being a 
mark of personal distinction. Other devotees it enhsts 
because of the opportunity it gives to impress one's views 
upon the community and to perform actual public service. 
And others cultivate it through a sincere devotion to cer- 
tain fixed trends of opinion, out of which party spirit and 
organization have been gradually evolved. 

Finally, with so many offices to be filled, and so many 
points of contact between the poUtical and the business 
world, it is natural enough that politics should have become 
in itself a form of business activity, and that the politician 
and the office-seeker should have emerged by the hundreds 



132 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

of thousands as a distinct type or class, looking upon public 
employment as a means of livelihood, and also pursuing 
partisan and other non-official pohtical activities from the 
pecuniary motive. The growth of the party system in 
the United States is to be attributed to all these motives 
and conditions. 

The European observer is constantly trying to find some 
essential analogy between American parties and those with 
which he is familiar in other countries. He pursues his 
inquiry with some confidence for a little distance, and then 
finds himself completely baffled. As a rule, he desires to 
find one great American party radical in its tendencies and 
the other conservative. 

What he really finds in existence are two great perma- 
nent institutions, constantly undergoing modification, some- 
times violently affected by internal revolution, but somehow 
maintaining continuity through the decades and through the 
generations. These American parties are political agencies 
or vehicles. With respect to a public question that may 
strongly affect public opinion at a given moment, one of 
these great mechanisms is likely to be taken possession of 
for radical purposes, while the other, from force of circum- 
stances, will lend itself to conservative uses. 

Where neither one of the great traditional organizations 
has shown itself responsive enough to some comparatively 
sudden wave of conviction regarding a particular subject, 
new organizations have been launched to represent a point 
of view and to make a propaganda or a crusade for a special 
cause, unencumbered by the burden of general responsibility 
belonging to the older political organizations. Sometimes 
these new movements have so coincided with internal revo- 
lution in an older party that they have drawn to themselves 



THE CITIZEN AND HIS PART IN POLITICS 133 

vitality enough for permanence. But in that case they 
have ceased to represent the special cause which explained 
their origin, and have come to serve the more general pur- 
poses of an American institutional party. 

Thus the Federalists broke down and reappeared in the 
later Whig organization, which, in turn, after some brief 
special movements, like that of the Free-Soil party in the 
fifties, found new birth in the great Republican party, which 
is entering on the third generation of its existence. 

The great Democratic party, meanwhile, has kept its 
name and its essential continuity through more than a 
hundred years, with many an internal struggle and con- 
stant modification through changes in the drift of public 
opinion. Most native Americans have found themselves 
by birth or by natural association affiliated with one or 
the other of these great party systems. They have found 
very considerable room for play of opinion within the struc- 
ture of the party. 

Most naturalized citizens, on the other hand, have found 
themselves drawn into the one organization or the other 
through accident, or instinct, or tribal clannishness. The 
Democrats in New York, Baltimore, and other Eastern cities 
had perfected a form of party organization which was both 
congenial and advantageous to the Irish immigrant. A 
different set of circumstances drew the German immigrants 
largely into the Republican organization. For like reasons, 
the Scandinavians of the Northv/est became Republicans 
for the most part. 

In the westward movement, the name Democracy 
had identified itself with the ideas of personal- and 
local freedom and state assertion. The leaders of the 
slave power had by degrees and with much political skill 



134 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

captured control of the machinery and the higher councils 
of the Democratic party. When Secession came, the 
Republican party found itself identified with the cause of 
the Union and an unbroken nationality. Naturally, a 
vast number of so-called "war Democrats" of the North, 
either through conviction or advantage, passed by degrees 
into the Republican ranks. 

The Republican leaders of the North had enfranchised 
the slaves, and naturally sought after the war to retain a 
political domination through negro votes in the Southern 
states. The more determined and drastic their Southern 
policy, the more certain was it that two things would hap- 
pen : first, a reaction in the North, with a strong and per- 
manent revival of the Northern Democratic party; and, 
second, a union of Southern white men for defensive pur- 
poses under the Democratic banner. 

Thus there arose a situation which had a tendency to 
intensify party life and organization and to keep sectional 
and race questions to the front in such a way as to hamper 
the true progress of the country. Republican leadership 
found it expedient to play upon Northern prejudice by 
warnings that Democratic success would mean a virtual 
reenslavement of the negroes, and the payment by the 
nation of the Confederate war debt. And other like 
apprehensions were aroused. 

The Democratic politicians, on the other hand, sought to 
keep the South solid in support of their party through con- 
stant reminders of the evils of the Reconstruction period, 
and assertions regarding the future purposes of the Repub- 
lican leaders. Circumstances had brought the two great 
parties to opposing attitudes with respect to the tariff ques- 
tion, and this question had also assumed certain sectional 



THE CITIZEN AND HIS PART IN POLITICS 135 

phases, so that in campaigns of acute tariff discussion, 
pubhc opinion had driven masses of voters from one camp 
to the other. 

Again, when the great Prohibition wave swept across the 
country, those old elements of moral reform which had op- 
posed slavery and had, for the most part, associated them- 
selves with the Republican party, were strong enough in 
many states to bring the official force of their party into line 
against the liquor traffic. This attitude drove scores of thou- 
sands of Germans and other voters of foreign descent into 
the Democratic organization. Meanwhile, the more intense 
adherents of the Prohibition cult, brooking no compromise 
or delay, and invoking the spirit and example of the irrec- 
oncilable Abolitionists of an earlier day, formed themselves 
into a third party, destined, of course, to a gradual decline 
as the question of the moment lost its intensity. 

In like fashion, the Greenback movement had arisen, pro- 
testing against the payment of the war debt in gold, and the 
resumption of a specie basis. Then came the Western Gran- 
ger movement, based on opposition to railroad domination 
and monopoly influence. The acute phases of these agita- 
tions expressed themselves in independent temporary Third 
Party movements, while the questions at issue affected 
profoundly the character and conduct of the older parties, 
while also causing a considerable change in their member- 
ship. The later Populistic movement had a somewhat 
similar career, its chief historical results having to do with 
the conditions of party in the Southern states. 

When, in 1896, the gold standard wing prevailed in the 
Republican organization, and the free silver wing seized firm 
control of the Democratic machinery, there was a great drift 
of Eastern Democrats to the Republican camp, while the 



136 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

Republicans of the Far West by the hundreds of thousands 
transferred their allegiance to the party led by Mr. Bryan. 
Meanwhile, the increased production of gold settled the 
money question outside of the political sphere. The con- 
servative wing of the Democracy nominated Judge Parker 
for the presidency in 1904. The younger and more vital 
forces of the Repubhcan party nominated Mr. Roosevelt. 
And the Western Republicans, who had in previous cam- 
paigns followed Mr. Bryan as an exponent of their financial 
and economic views, returned with enthusiasm to the 
Republican fold. 

All this I have set forth, not by way of a summary of 
party history, but rather for illustration of the nature of the 
two great dominating parties. They are institutional and 
organic. At moments when public opinion is greatly stirred 
by some question of the hour, the parties seem to exist for 
the sake of representing the opposing views and fighting the 
resultant battles. But, in reality, the parties exist simply 
because the great business of politics in America is so 
extended, so complex, and so continuous, that it requires 
permanent organization. 

It is conceivable that this permanent voluntary organi- 
zation might go forward, with a single party, inside of 
which different tendencies and views should from time to 
time assert themselves. This, indeed, is exactly what is 
now going on in a number of the Southern states, where, 
for all practical purposes, the Democratic party occupies 
the entire field, and where the official election merely rati- 
fies the decisions that have been arrived at in previous 
conventions or primary elections of this dominant party. 

There have been brief periods in the larger national life 
when a single party was so dominant that the preliminary 



THE CITIZEN AND HIS PART IN POLITICS 1S1 

struggle of opposing elements within the party had more 
significance than the formal campaign and election which 
expressed the relative strength of the two party organiza- 
tions. But, generally speaking, there have been reasons 
growing out of differences of public opinion on the one 
hand, and out of the practical conditions of the business of 
pohtics on the other hand, to justify the existence and 
continuity of two great rival organizations. 

Their instinct has been to align themselves with the larger 
and more permanent trends of cleavage in public opinion. 
They have endeavored to keep their national character by 
popularizing the controversial aspects of pubhc questions. 
Their appeals from time to time to enlightened pubHc 
opinion, or to wide-spread prejudice, have been made 
through the resolutions, or so-called "platforms" adopted 
every four years by the great party convention that nomi- 
nates the Presidential ticket. The Presidential nominee 
harmonizes and expounds party opinion. If elected, he 
is recognized by both parties as virtually bound to carry 
on the affairs of the country in accordance with the 
general views of the party that supported him. 

But while it is thus the business of a great party to 
formulate views of public policy, and, when in power, to 
make the laws and administer the government in some 
manner consistent with those views, it is also the 
business of the party, for practical purposes, to con- 
cern itself with the political life of the states, the counties, 
and the minor political divisions. At every point, from 
the Presidency down to the petty road district, as our 
system developed, the voluntary organization of political 
life found itself in contact with the official business of 
government. 



138 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OP AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

The parties were organized with their central com- 
mittees corresponding to poUtical divisions. The national 
committee was made up of a member from each state; 
the state committee was composed on a corresponding 
plan ; and for lesser territories, — congressional districts, 
counties, townships, or municipalities, — the party had its 
organization, represented by officers and standing commit- 
tees. While the governing work of counties and villages 
had no necessary party relationship to that of states or the 
nation, the tendency to use party machinery in the selection 
of local candidates and the carrying on of campaigns, was 
too strong to be successfully resisted. 

Party political life associated itself, in the nature of the 
case, with the whole structure of government from top to 
bottom. With the development of the economic and pro- 
fessional life of the country, the management of political 
machinery tended more and more to become an absorbing 
and specialized form of business. With a million or more 
of officials to be chosen by popular election, and many 
hundreds of thousands of places to be filled by appoint- 
ment, — all the way from a cabinet officer or an ambassa- 
dor, down to a policeman or the janitor of a school build- 
ing, — the political life of the United States assumed an 
exceedingly practical aspect. 

The "outs" wanted the offices, and the "ins" wished 
to retain them ; while from a variety of motives, the lead- 
ing spirits in the business of politics, whether themselves 
office-holders or not, desired to keep their places of influ- 
ence and control in the voluntary organization as well as 
in the official business of government. The salaries of offi- 
cials and the other expenditures of government meant the 
assessment and levying of taxes and the collection and dis- 



THE CITIZEN AND HIS PART IN POLITICS 139 

bursement of hundreds or thousands of dollars in the small- 
est divisions, of scores or hundreds of thousands in the 
towns and counties, of millions in the state, and of hun- 
dreds of millions in the nation. 

It is not strange, then, that what had grown to be so vast 
a business undertaking from the standpoint of personnel 
and of cost as the carrying on of government, should have 
resulted in the development of a professional class of 
pohticians whose motive, to some extent, was personal 
gain. It did not follow of necessity that this was their 
sole motive, or that they pursued it by corrupt methods. 
But it is obvious enough that a situation of that kind would 
at times offer strong temptations to those seeking to gain 
or to retain political power. 

Furthermore, as the country expanded in wealth and in 
complexity of economic life, the opportunities of private 
life became more and more alluring and absorbing. This 
fact contributed not a little to the tendency of political 
life to become professionalized under the lead of men not 
wholly actuated by public spirit. 

The power as well, as the necessity of party organiza- 
tion was increased not merely by the number of elective 
and appointive offices and the elaborate structure of 
the official machinery of government, but also by the 
circumstances which had tended to concentrate the hold- 
ing of elections upon a single day. This concentration 
was due partly to reasons of public economy and con- 
venience, and partly to the influence of the professional 
politicians, whose control was better assured by such a 
method. When, on the same Tuesday in November, the 
citizens in a given voting precinct must cast their ballots 
for a national Presidential ticket, a member of Congress, 



140 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

a governor of their state, and other general state officers, 
judges of several state courts, an entire set of county offi- 
cers, and various municipal, or township, or other local 
functionaries, it becomes extremely difficult to do any- 
thing else except to make a choice between the long line 
of candidates offered by one party and the long line offered 
by the other. 

Such conditions have tended to strengthen parties and 
perpetuate them, through their control of the organiza- 
tion, apart from which pohtical life has had no full and 
effective means of expression. Thus we have found a very 
important series of American political problems arising 
from the tendency of the mere voluntary organization of 
the political life to become obstructive and arbitrary. 
From this condition has arisen a series of efforts to reform 
the machinery and to secure elasticity and freedom for 
the expression of the will of the democracy. 

The deeper remedy for all such evils must, of course, lie in 
the development of the individual citizen. While the two 
great party vehicles — as common carriers, so to speak — 
may compete in perpetuity for popular patronage, the 
individual citizen need not always ride in the same wagon. 
The "bolt" has always been recognized as a party cor- 
rective. The more valuable bolt is that which is due to the 
awakening of an independent mind and spirit in a well- 
instructed voter, who is superior to the average of char- 
acter, or standard, or opinion, that controls his party at a 
given moment. 

The less valuable form of bolt is due to some prejudice 
or susceptibihty that affects races or classes or localities, 
whose standard is lower than that of the average that 
dominates the party. A dozen illustrations of both forms 



THE CITIZEN AND HIS PART IN POLITICS 141 

of party insurrection will readily occur to any one familiar 
with our recent politics. 

With the earlier development of party spirit and party 
organization, there appeared, first, the theory that party 
solidarity must be maintained, and, second, the practical 
consequence that party divisions were carried into local 
elections. In rural communities, with average conditions 
of intelligence, it was easy to develop the habit of rotation 
in office. Public duties were simple, and the honors and 
emoluments of office were distributed not merely by alter- 
nation between parties, but also by brevity of tenure and 
rapid succession within the ranks of a given party organi- 
zation. 

Gradually there developed also in the holding of ap- 
pointive places — as well as in elective ones — the prin- 
ciple of change by alternation of parties and of further 
change by rapid rotation. These principles became crys- 
tallized in phrases. The party principle was embodied in 
the assertion that "to the victor belong the spoils." The 
principle of short tenm'e and rapid succession found embodi- 
ment in the dictum that "we must have no permanent 
office-holding class in America." But, as the coimtry 
advanced, and fife became more intense and specialized, 
we learned that the spoils system and the rotation system 
were actually creating a political and official caste or class 
of an inferior and dangerous political type. 

Office-holding and office-seeking began to dominate party 
organization. The vast expenditure made possible by the 
strife of parties and the conduct of campaigns was largely 
turned to vicious ends. The party in power levied assess- 
ments upon all office-holders to procure funds with which to 
contest doubtful states or districts, or smaller divisions. On 



142 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

the other hand, the candidates of the opposition party for 
elective office and the aspirants for future appointive place, 
were expected to provide the sinews of war for the great 
contest that, if successful, would admit hundreds of thou- 
sands of applicants to coveted places at the public crib. 

The Civil Service Reform movement made its way, slowly 
at first, but with increasing influence, with a view to emanci- 
pate the voluntary political life, on the one hand, and to im- 
prove the character of government work on the other. From 
the time of President Jackson to the time of President 
Grant, the office-seeking influence had been steadily grow- 
ing, until it had taken on the dimensions of a great evil. 

I am dealing with these questions in principle rather than 
in detail. The purposes of government in America have 
not been to carry on all sorts of elaborate undertakings, 
but rather to secure freedom and to provide and regulate 
conditions under which the private enterprises and volun- 
tary relationships of human society might develop equitably 
and prosperously. Government was to be a positive force 
in its provisions for national progress and the permanent 
success of our institutions. But otherwise, the functions 
of government were, in the main, to be of a negative kind. 
Sentiment was against the building up of highly trained, 
permanent administrative services, because we were not 
accustomed to the idea that the business of government 
was of a kind that required any such system. In a nation 
where every boy was familiar with the use of the rifle and 
the shot-gun, we were disposed to rely upon the quick 
improvization of armies, in case of need. Our regular 
army had been reduced to a mere skeleton for use as a 
national police against the outbreak of hostile Indians in 
the Far West. In like manner, we were accustomed to 



THE CITIZEN AND HIS PART IN POLITICS 143 

think of the civil tasks of public employment as open to 
everybody, requiring no particular training, and to as- 
sociate office-holding with political activity. 

But even with no radical change of theory or practice re- 
garding the functions of government, the most restricted 
forms of public work of necessity grew elaborate and re- 
quired a large personnel as the country expanded. The great 
central offices of administration, like the Treasury and the 
Post-office at Washington, required thousands of clerks. 
The post-offices in the larger cities were employing hundreds 
of carriers, as well as clerks. The custom houses and the 
other branches of the revenue service were employing great 
numbers of men whose work required skill and knowledge. 

We began, furthermore, to discover that, however far in 
advance of Europe our development of a great equal 
democracy might have gone, Germany, France, and Eng- 
land had brought order and system into their administra- 
tive work, with many resultant benefits. The great strug- 
gle to overthrow the spoils system, and the history of the 
steady development of the merit system, are matters of 
familiar knowledge. I mention them only as illustrating 
a phase of political life through which our democratic 
institutions had to pass. 

I may add that a reform of this kind also illustrates 
another sort of voluntary political organization, apart from 
political parties, in which American citizenship of the best 
type finds constant opportunity for tlie exercise of public 
spirit and the expression of opinion in an effective way. 
The National Civil Service Reform Association, with its 
state and local branches, was in a position at all times to 
instruct public opinion through the press, to urge its views 
upon law-making bodies and high executive officials, and 



144 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

to make propaganda within the lines of party. Little by 
little the reform grew, until parties endorsed it, Congress 
and the legislatures were willing to sustain it, and high 
appointive officers welcomed it for the relief it afforded 
them and for the heightened efficiency it brought to the 
public service. 

The spoils system, as it formerly existed, was one of the 
chief factors in our political life. It is not yet completely 
eliminated, but it is no longer dominant. Hundreds of 
thousands of public servants in the United States — federal, 
state, and municipal — are now appointed for reasons of 
fitness and retained for efficiency and good behavior. It is 
now contrary as well to law as to public sentiment to assess 
them for campaign funds, and they are free both from 
the fear of the clean party sweep, and also from the danger 
of losing employment under the old custom of quick rota- 
tion in office. 



VI 

FURTHER PROBLEMS RELATING TO PARTY MACHINERY AND 
THE FREEDOM OF DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION 

The business of politics, as carried on by the extensive 
groups and hierarchies of politicians controlling the rival 
party organizations, had become accustomed to a large use 
of money. The gradual shrinkage of contributions from 
the contingents of office-holders and office-seekers did not 
seem greatly to affect the prosperity of politics as a leading 
American industry. The machinery of parties seemed more 
powerful and more permanent than ever, and there was 
ample evidence of the abundance and constant use of 
money in carrying on this political machinery. 

It was further to be seen that so much money in politics 
could not have been supplied by candidates for elective 
office, nor could it be traced to the voluntary gifts of un- 
selfish and devoted party members. Party machinery 
seemed ever more rigid, and less responsive to the higher 
trends of public opinion. Party platforms were of such a 
sort, and nominees for office of such quality, that the voter 
came to feel that however excellent our democratic institu- 
tions might be in their theory they were somehow clogged 
and obstructed in their practical working. Tlie thoughtful 
voter seemed to be limited to a choice of evils. The pro- 
fessional element in the parties had gained too firm a con- 
trol, as against the ordinary citizen, usually occupied with 
his private affairs though enrolled as a Republican or a 

h 145 



146 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

Democrat. The local party members who worked at poli- 
tics as a trade were able to control the caucuses and pri- 
mary elections, to name the delegates to conventions, 
and to select the nominees for local offices and for the 
legislature of their state. 

There had grown up a ramified system of professional 
politics in each party, unaffected by the play of public 
opinion, and evidently under direction from a central 
authority. This development of our political Ufe came to 
be known as the "machine" or "boss" system. From a 
wholly different system and theory of party leadership and 
regularity, there had developed an arbitrary and tyranni- 
cal organization, never exactly alike in different states, yet 
similar enough to be characterized in the same sweeping 
terms. It simply meant that the organization of political 
life had been seized upon by private interests, for private 
advantage, whereas the original and natural purpose of 
political organization was for public ends and for the 
general welfare. 

The chosen sphere of a distinct organization under the 
machine, or boss, system was the separate state. The pri- 
vate interests concerned were twofold, namely, those of the 
professional poUtical class itself, which directly or indi- 
rectly found its sources of livelihood and gain in the con- 
trol of politics, and, second, the large private interests of 
various sorts which could be so harmed or so benefited by 
legislative or governmental action as to make them a 
growing factor in political life. 

The country's economic activities had grown to im- 
mense proportions, and the rewards of business life had 
drawn away thousands of men who otherwise would have 
been available for public service or for the quasi-public life 



PARTY MACHINERY AND DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION 147 

of the learned professions. These business activities had, 
to an increasing extent, taken the form of joint stock 
companies or corporations. As such, they were the crea- 
tures of the state and subject to its regulation. As the 
cities grew in population, the companies that held fran- 
chises to supply light, or transit service, or some other 
form of local need, became powerful and began to rank 
with the railroad, telegraph, telephone, insurance, bank- 
ing, and other large corporations, whose methods were 
subject to public regulation. 

Obviously, a session of the state legislature was a matter 
of deep concern for such corporations. In the earlier stages 
of their interest in public action, they were represented at 
state capitals by agents, sometimes of good repute, some- 
times of bad. To obtain a law that they desired, or to 
prevent a measure that would injure them, they were pre- 
pared to spend money, sometimes in good faith, sometimes 
corruptly. But as their interests grew in magnitude, the 
political system began to adapt itself to a changing situa- 
tion. It was a crude and dangerous method, as well as a 
merely stop-gap and temporary one, to maintain lobbies 
and attempt to bribe law-makers at the seat of government. 
A better method was to help secure discipline and au- 
thority in the poHtical organizations, and then to deal 
quietly with the chiefs of a professionaHzed pohtical sys- 
tem. Thus the lobby in its more offensive aspects began 
to grow obsolete, and the party machine became a thing of 
method and discipline, recognizing some form of autocratic 
leadership. 

The machine would have defeated its own ends if it had 
become too cynical, or too intolerant of the well-meaning 
members of the party who still regarded the structure as 



148 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

capable, from time to time, of serving useful public ends. 
The machine was supplied with money by the corporations 
and various private interests, seeking either favors or 
immunity. The object of the system was to put in control 
leaders who knew how to maintain discipline and secure 
desired results. The corporations expected no accounting 
for the money. As a rule, it took the form of unrecorded 
and unacknowledged party campaign funds. 

The boss or central authority of the party secured such a 
use of the money as would lubricate the machinery and give 
assurance of continued control. The system concerned itself 
quietly with the selection of candidates for the legislature, 
and supplied them with funds in a way that was meant to 
put them under personal obligation. Country newspapers 
were subsidized on a plan that was carefully intended to 
be flattering to their usefulness and independence, rather 
than humiliating to their self-respect. 

The system made it possible to give such attention to 
details and such forethought to every phase of political 
life that the control of caucuses and conventions was, under 
ordinary circumstances, fully assured. The one party 
could not be used to expose and break down the machine 
control of the other party, for the obvious reason that both 
were in the same condition. They were supplied with 
funds from the same sources, and were, in the nature of the 
case, bound to be subservient to the same interests. Thus 
it would happen not infrequently that a state legislature 
almost equally divided between the two parties would not 
have one member in twenty, or one in fifty, whose nomi- 
nation and election had not been agreeable to forces behind 
the two machines, and whose legislative action could not 
be counted upon by those who held the party reins. 



PARTY MACHINERY AND DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION 149 

Such a system is not necessarily one of deliberate in- 
vention. It is the growth of a variety of conditions, and 
many of those who are most obedient to it do not imder- 
stand the nature of the yoke they wear. The corrupting 
and demoralizing effect of these methods is not always 
perceived at first, and the extent of their harmful working 
will naturally vary in different states according to circum- 
stances. It is probably within the bounds of truth to say 
that there is not one of our states which has not, to a very 
considerable extent, come under the baneful influence of 
this system, by means of which the political life of the 
people is dominated and exploited for private ends by 
rich working corporations in alliance with professional 
party politicians. 

I am not discussing the question whether or not the 
corporations desire midue privileges, or whether their par- 
ticipation in politics has been in the nature of a defen- 
sive movement against unjust and hampering restrictions. 
Readers will remember that my theme is the political 
life itself, and that I am discussing the methods by 
which the citizen operates his government. And I am 
endeavoring to show that a great part of the problem of 
the political life of a democratic people hes in their keeping 
a proper control over the means by which they may get at 
the official work of government and may secure and main- 
tain the freedom and elasticity of democratic life. 

With health and vigor in the body politic, with intelli- 
gence and virtue in the citizenship of the country, and with 
a press not wholly controlled by private interests, the reac- 
tion against machine politics could only be a question of 
time. The non-professional political elements in our par- 
ties began to assert themselves, and their success in one 



150 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

place emboldened their efforts in another. Various devices 
were proposed and some of them brought into effect to 
weaken the control of professional party machines. It was 
evident enough that the holding of municipal elections at a 
separate time would make it far easier to deal with local 
candidates and questions upon their merits. Thus, many 
of our larger cities are gradually finding a free political life 
of their own, not wholly detached from parties and their 
working, but no longer hopelessly subjected to such 
machinery. 

The use of an official ballot paper has made the whole- 
sale bribery of voters far more difficult than in former 
times, but in most of our states the voting paper still lends 
itself too much to the purposes of party machines by the 
arrangement of names in party columns. There has been a 
great growth throughout the country of the primary elec- 
tion system as a means by which to enable the voters of a ■ 
party to select their candidates for important offices, this 
being regarded as a remedy for the evils of a convention 
system, controlled by the professional politicians. To give 
secm-ity to such a primary system, it is becoming the rule 
to give it an official character and standing by enactments 
which expressly recognize the existence of political parties 
as a part of our governing machinery. It remains to be 
seen whether the voluntary association of citizens in par- 
ties should thus come under detailed regulation of law. 

The essential remedy for evils in the practical working 
of politics does not lie in the change of systems. In many 
states the substitution of primary elections for nominat- 
ing conventions may have excellent results for a time. 
It remains for experience to improve methods and to change 
them from time to time. The real remedy lies in the 



PARTY MACHINERY AND DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION 151 

awakening of public opinion and the political assertion of 
good citizens. 

Many states have passed or else are considering laws 
regulating political expenditure and requiring publicity 
as regards the source and the use of money in carrying 
on elections. There is also a movement on foot which 
will result in the prohibition of political contributions 
by private corporations. The collection of money from 
corporations was very large in the Presidential campaign 
of 1896, and it was excused on the ground that the business 
interests of the coimtry required the defeat of the free-silver 
movement. Every one can see clearly enough now that 
directors and trustees should not have appropriated the 
money of stockholders for political uses. Laws and pub- 
lic regulations affecting these matters are timely and to be 
encouraged. But the endeavors to enact such laws are 
chiefly important for what they indicate as regards an 
aroused pubhc opinion. 

The alliance between corporate business interests and 
professional politics cannot be wholly broken up, because 
there is so much at stake for both parties to the bargain. 
But honest and public-spirited politics can so strongly assert 
itself, by the side of the politics of private interest and 
profit, as to restore something like old-time freedom and 
elasticity to the life of parties. The rival organizations are 
put upon their good behavior by the great growth of inde- 
pendent voting and by the new vigor of those men in both 
parties whose motives are public-spirited and whose ability 
in political work is so great as to have broken the spell of 
professionalism. It has become the fashion to make more 
direct appeal to the people, to cultivate the plain voters, 
and to break down the tyranny of the party machines. 



152 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

Along with the movement for greater freedom in the 
play of voluntary official forces is a corresponding move- 
ment for a more responsive and elastic character in the 
official business of government. It is natural, when the 
people feel that the bosses and machines select the members 
of the legislature and dictate much of the work of the law- 
making bodies, that there should be demand for methods 
to secure a more prompt and certain expression of the 
popular will. Hence the movement for the election of 
United States senators by the people ; for a direct popular 
vote upon various measures of a statutory character through 
constitutional amendment; and for direct democratic par- 
ticipation in law-making through the device known as the 
"initiative and referendum." 

Although a vast majority of the people of the United 
States are in favor of the direct election of United States 
senators, it is almost hopelessly difficult to overcome the 
inertia that stands in the way of amending the federal Con- 
stitution. Meanwhile, many states are adopting methods 
of one kind or another to secure an unofficial popular 
choice of senators, and the force of public opinion is com- 
pelling the legislatures to ratify such selections. 

The state constitutions are no longer confined to a brief 
setting forth of the organic structure of the state govern- 
ment, but contain an ever increasing number of provisions 
of a statutory character regarded as of permanent public 
importance. Such provisions in most states require a 
cumbrous process for adoption. As a rule, they must pass 
two successive legislatures, then be submitted to the people. 
In spite of difficulties, a large number of provisions are thus 
voted upon every year in one state or another. Many 
states require the submission to the people of a question 



PARTY MACHINERY AND DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION 153 

involving bonded indebtedness. A recent illustration is 
afforded by the vote of the people of the state of New York 
to spend $100,000,000 upon the canal system. 

There is an increased feeling that more questions of pub- 
lic concern rather than fewer ought to be submitted to 
direct popular vote, and that the processes should be sim- 
pler and more rapid. In Oregon, where the usual process 
of amending the constitution requires five years, a new 
alternative system has been put into effect which takes 
only three or four months. A given number of voters 
may initiate an amendment to the constitution by send- 
ing a petition to the Secretary of State, which is followed 
by a proclamation of the governor calling for an elec- 
tion. 

In 1906 five amendments were thus offered in Oregon, and 
four of them were adopted. This innovation is regarded 
with so much favor that we shall probably witness a con- 
siderable development of the movement for giving the people 
a quicker and more direct means of dealing with important 
matters in their laws and constitutions. While this move- 
ment is upon the formal and official side of government, its 
chief significance lies in the relation it bears to that larger 
movement — chiefly in the voluntary and imofficial organi- 
zation of politics — to make the public will effective and 
to find means by which to break down the tyranny and 
power of party machinery. 

Obviously, if we are to have the party system main- 
tained, it must be made truly democratic and responsive. 
There must be free play within party lines for those whole- 
some and normal motives which make the political life 
interesting and inviting to American citizens in general. 
When the spoils system became intolerable, the proper 



154 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

correctives were applied. And again, when party organiza- 
tion and work become too much a separate and professional 
interest, dominated by private and business motives, public 
spirit becomes aroused, a revival of genuine political life 
follows, various methods are found to weaken machine 
control and liberate political life, and thus normal con- 
ditions are once more in control. 

The domination of the political life of the country by 
rigid party machines, maintained by lavish funds exacted 
from private interests, was a gradual development due to 
complex conditions. That being true, it is evident that 
the rescue of poUtics from that form of tyranny could not 
be accomplished by any momentary wave of agitation, nor 
by any mere device or concurrence of devices for the 
restoration of a true democratic freedom. 

Yet various devices will have been found useful; and 
wave after wave of agitation will have been salutary in a 
high degree. At the basis of everything lies the general 
honesty and good intention of the people. With such a 
basis, the reformer in politics must succeed in the long run. 
Devices for making it difficult to bribe and corrupt the more 
ignorant mass of voters will always help, on the negative 
side, that good work of the more positive kind which con- 
sists in the efficient training of the children for citizenship 
and in the use of all sorts of agencies for the advance- 
ment of social conditions. 

Devices for protecting the voting system are of great 
practical use when they coincide with popular movements, 
courageously led, of revolt against absolute and wanton 
tyranny of party control. Pennsylvania affords a good 
illustration. A recent correction of voting methods has 
brought to an end a system in Philadelphia under which 



PARTY MACHINERY AND DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION 155 

the dominant machine could maintain itself, at any moment 
of peril, by casting scores of thousands of fraudulent 
votes. 

This improvement of machinery will be of inestimable 
value in the future political life of that important state. It 
could not have been secured apart from a general agitation 
for freedom and reform in politics. Insurrection against 
the machine and boss systems was needed to secure the 
device of perfected voting arrangements, while the oppor- 
tunity for an honest casting and counting of the votes was 
necessary in order to give revolt from party tyranny any 
fair chance of success. 

A period of extreme subjection to the party system in its 
disciplined and professionalized form has been followed by 
a period of lively revolt within party lines, and of attack 
from without by associations of independent voters. These 
independents have been able in most states to secure reason- 
able freedom of opportunity. The laws now make it pos- 
sible for them to nominate candidates by petition and have 
their nominees placed upon the official voting paper. Per- 
sistent work on the part of the professional party machines 
has been met by almost equally persistent work by organiza- 
tions of political reformers. These groups have made it 
their business to expose the selfish and venal practices 
resulting from the alliance of private interests and party 
machines, and to work unceasingly for particular devices 
in the field of reform methods, or for the general freedom 
and improvement of public life. 

An admirable instance of such work is afforded by the 
Municipal Voters' League of Chicago, which has accom- 
plished much not only for the betterment of the govern- 
mental business of that great city, but also for the improve- 



156 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

ment of the politics of the state of Illinois, and thus for a 
higher tone in the political life of the nation. 

For, although at times there has been much venality 
in the political life of the rural neighborhoods, especially 
in New York and the Eastern states, the worst evils of the 
machine and boss systems have been intrenched in the 
great cities. It has been evident that if democratic prin- 
ciples could maintain themselves with some measure of 
freedom and effect in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cin- 
cinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, and San Francisco, the country 
as a whole could keep its faith in the permanence of our 
American institutions of self-government, and could apply 
itself with confidence to the correction from time to time 
of such evils as might grow up with changing conditions. 

It is encouraging, therefore, to note the fact that there 
is great vigor of democratic life in these fast-growing cen- 
ters of population. Almost countless faults of political 
method and governmental administration can be found 
remaining in these great communities, but the saving feature 
of the situation lies in the fact that all these faults are 
known, exposed, and publicly criticized and combated. 
However great may be the faults of a sensational press, it 
is generally to be found ready to expose, if not to magnify, 
the faults and scandals of a professionalized party system 
and a corrupt alliance between private corporate interests 
and the control of law-making and administration. 

Even the minor parties and the less regular movements, 
led sometimes by fanatics and sometimes by demagogues 
— not excepting the coteries of extreme Socialists — have 
a certain value, because they are to some extent a protest 
against the stifling of democratic expression by the machine 
control of the great parties. They are compelled to 



PARTY MACHINERY AND DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION 157 

make their appeal to the convictions of the plain citizen, 
usually to working-men whose political education they are 
helping to promote. 

In the period before we had secured in the great cities, 
as in New York, a concurrence of public opinion on the 
one hand and legal devices on the other, to protect the 
ballot box and make certain of honest elections, the political 
corruption of the great cities endangered the working not 
merely of local institutions, but also of national. For, as 
I have aheady remarked, the climax of our political system 
lies in the quadrennial election of the President, and our 
method of electing a President puts an enormous strain 
upon the working political machinery of a few of the larger 
and so-called "pivotal" states. This is particularly true 
of the state of New York. 

The conditions which I have already described have for 
a long time made it reasonably certain that in presidential 
years the Southern states would support the Democratic 
party. It has been less certain, but fairly probable, that 
the New England states, Pennsylvania, and most of the 
Northwestern states would be carried by the Republicans, 
Under our prevaihng system, with rare exceptions, each 
state gives its entire electoral support to one presiden- 
tial candidate or to the other. Where, on account of its 
great population, a state has a large number of electoral 
votes, its importance in the presidential year is obvious. 

Thus the state of New York has a larger electoral vote 
than any other, and its party complexion has usually been 
regarded as doubtful in presidential years. It is divided 
between two almost equal bodies of population, namely, the 
four millions living in and near the great metropolis, and 
the four millions living elsewhere in the state. In normal 



158 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

presidential years, the voters of the metropolitan district 
are Democratic by a great preponderance, and the voters 
of the rest of the state are Republican by a similar majority. 
If New York were divided into two states, the two would 
be practically equal in electoral strength; the one would 
usually be Democratic, the other usually Republican ; they 
would offset one another in the general result, — just as 
Iowa and Kentucky have always practically offset one 
another, — and thus no extreme or abnormal pressure 
would be brought to bear upon the political life of New 
York in quadrennial national campaigns. 

But, as matters have stood in the past, a result affecting 
profoundly the country as a whole was likely to turn upon 
the success of one party or the other in the great state of 
New York. And that success might in any presidential 
year turn upon the count of a single ballot box in a small 
voting precinct dominated by a Tammany politician in a 
lodging-house neighborhood off the Bowery. 

The great contest of 1876 between Hayes and Tilden 
turned upon the prevalence of fraud and corruption in the 
voting machinery, chiefly in several reconstructed Southern 
states, but also to some extent in other parts of the country. 
This strain was so great that our institutions were subjected 
to a serious test. We were in some danger of revolution 
from what was then called the "Mexicanizing" of our forms 
of government. The party in power was quickly mobiliz- 
ing the army, and the party out of power was threaten- 
ing a great volunteer movement upon Washington. The 
crisis was tided over through a practical though extra- 
constitutional compromise, and the result was accepted 
by a democracy that had learned the need of some forbear- 
ance and patience through the experience of a terrible 



PARTY MACHINERY AND DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION 159 

Civil War brought on by the rashness of theorists and the 
narrow selfishness of special interests. 

Another illustration of the danger of imperfect political 
machinery came in the great campaign of 1884, which 
turned wholly upon the count of the votes in the city of 
New York, or the metropolitan district in general. The 
balance was almost even, and a few votes either way would 
carry the entire electoral strength of the Empire state to 
the Republican or the Democratic side, and determine 
the national result. The Republicans had been in power 
at Washington since 1860. It was an intense struggle. 
Apart from a great tide of genuine political sentiment and 
party feeling, there was enormous pressure on both sides 
from office-seeking politicians and from diverse private 
interests. Mr. Blaine was defeated, and the Democrats, 
under Mr. Cleveland, came into power. The defeat of Mr. 
Blaine was at the moment attributed to the effect of an 
offensive phrase — an alliteration coined by a Protestant 
clergyman — which offended Catholic voters. 

But it was afterward fomid that in spite of the clergy- 
man's tactless remark, Mr. Blaine would have been elected 
but for ballot-box frauds perpetrated by a politician who 
in due time languished in the penitentiary for his crimes. 
Republicans at that period believed that ballot-box frauds 
and similar offenses against fundamental political honesty 
were almost wholly confined to the Democratic politicians. 
The Democrats believed that bribery and the improper use 
of money were essentially Republican offenses. But the 
plain fact is that we were living through a period of corrup- 
tion in our politics, from which neither party was free, 
although one party may have been more proficient than 
the other in particular forms of wrong-doing. 



160 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

The business of politics had been absorbed by the pro- 
fessional politician and office-seeker, who exploited it for 
purposes of gain. Meanwhile, the economic life of the 
country had grown more complex. Business interests were 
passing from the ownership of individuals and simple 
firms and partnerships, to large corporations. The re- 
lationship of political life to economic interests was taking 
on new forms. 

Hence the growth of professionalized politics and 
the venal alliance between political machines and private 
interests. And hence the emergence of a series of politi- 
cal problems having to do with the reassertion of hon- 
esty in public affairs, and the rescuing of the political life 
by the citizens. Resort was had to various legal devices 
and particular reforms to enable the people to liberate 
themselves from the bondage to which they had been sub- 
jected under the guise of party system and regularity, 
and under the pretense of allegiance to great principles 
and policies for which the parties professed to stand as 
necessary sponsors and guardians. 

One needs only to revert to the struggles of 1876 and 
1884 to see that substantial progress has been made in 
several essential directions. The civil service reformers 
have won their case in theory, and, to a very great extent, 
in practice. The reformers of ballot methods have made 
enormous progress, so that the grosser frauds that once 
prevailed in New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Chicago, 
are eliminated, while even Philadelphia seems to have 
won the battle for real and honest elections. Both great 
parties, even in critical elections, expect fairly honest 
voting and counting in the city of New York. 

To a very considerable extent municipal elections have 



PARTY MACHINERY AND DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION 161 

been made separate, so that they occur in the spring, 
or else, if coming in November, they fall in years when 
there are no general elections. In many states, more- 
over, the more important elections affecting the com- 
monwealth, as for the governor and the legislature, are 
arranged to occur in the years intervening between im- 
portant national campaigns, as for the presidency or for 
a new Congress. 

In a rapidly increasing number of states, the people have 
insisted upon a more direct control of party methods by 
substituting primary elections for the time-honored nomi- 
nating conventions. The great number of states in which 
the people in one way or another now insist upon a pre- 
liminary selection of United States senators, illustrates the 
many-sided movement in progress for securing to the ordi- 
nary citizen his share in the control of his party. The 
better public opinion of the state is learning to regulate the 
selection of candidates for high office, in order that the voter 
at the polls may not be limited to a virtual choice between 
two sets of men known to be either the obedient servants of 
party bosses and machines, or else the clever agents and 
tools of private interests. 

With the complex and specialized organization of party 
politics, has come into recognized and important existence 
a series of correspondingly well-organized movements in- 
tended to redeem and purify politics from one standpoint 
or another. And concurrent with all this systematic work 
to improve the legal and official devices through which 
democracy expresses itself, we have been witnessing in 
state after state a wholesome spirit of revolt against bosses 
and their corrupt methods, both within party lines and 
from without. This great struggle for a free democratic 



162 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

life and an honest government is far from being ended, and 
it will pass through many successive phases. But one 
reform after another has been largely gained, and, above 
all, the instrumentalities of reform have been created. 

Public opinion, both local and at large, has been wonder- 
fully developed of late, for improvement and progress in 
political methods. The public schools have created a 
nation of readers. Newspapers and periodicals have been 
multiplied, and the habit of newspaper reading is almost 
universal. Professionalized politics and selfish private 
interests have constantly endeavored in all sorts of ways to 
administer narcotics to the public through a subsidized 
or controlled newspaper press. Such efforts have gone far, 
but in the main they have failed. In a country where the 
freedom of the press is a constitutional prerogative, and 
where there exists a public and general interest that is 
distinct from the aims of a venal politics, the press will 
always sooner or later throw off its trammels and serve 
public as against private ends. 

The very profession of journalism makes for the public 
point of view. Even the party newspaper must maintain 
its measure of freedom ; and, if trammeled for a time, must 
in the end assert its normal liberty not only to publish the 
news, but also to represent the public interest and to com- 
bat the forces of tyranny and of wrong in politics and 
government. It is true there is no principle or motive 
working automatically to bring every newspaper or periodi- 
cal into the service of good government and a free democ- 
racy. Nevertheless, in a country of wide-spread popular 
intelligence, there is a demand for publicity to which the 
press must respond from the very nature of the case. 
And in the service of this right-minded demand, there is 



PARTY MACHINERY AND DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION 163 

always a tendency toward sound working opinions about 
public affairs on the part of those whose business it is to 
purvey and interpret the news. 

With the expansion of the metropolitan and local news- 
papers and the universal habit of reading them, there has 
also grown up a periodical press of national circulation, 
dependent for its success upon the belief of the intelligent 
public in its accuracy of statement and sincerity of view. 
This larger development of the press has proved to be of 
immense power not only in nationalizing public opinion, 
but also in synchronizing discussion and agitation for a 
particular reform or against a particular evil or abuse. 
Not to mention present-day exponents of such nationalized 
opinion in matters of politics and government, it is enough 
to call attention to the influence of the New York Weekly 
Tribune throughout the country in the days of Horace 
Greeley, or to that of Harper's Weekly under the editor- 
ship of George William Curtis. 

The dissemination not only of the local newspaper but 
also of the periodical detached from local interest and 
devoted to affairs of national concern, has been promoted 
by a remarkable and unique policy on the part of the Ameri- 
can government. The Post-Office Department for many 
years past, under direction of Congress, as a matter of 
deliberate public policy, has delivered newspapers and 
periodicals throughout the length and breadth of the land 
at a uniform rate of one cent a pound, regardless of the 
actual cost of the service. It has f mother promoted the 
newspaper press, as a local agent of public opinion and 
social and pohtical progress, by giving it free distribution 
within the county where it is published. And, last but not 
least, it has created a vast system of rural free delivery 



164 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

of postal matter which carries the newspaper and periodi- 
cal into the homes of millions of scattered farmers. 

A public policy such as this is undoubtedly susceptible 
of serious practical abuse. Yet the good ends that it 
serves are so vast in their consequences when compared 
with its abuses, that this postal policy must stand as one 
of the great monumental landmarks in the development 
and maintenance of our free democratic political life. 

With a vast continental domain, and a population soon 
to reach a hundred millions and of highly diverse origin, 
it has become true that the foremost single agency for 
unifying and nationalizing American life is the local and 
general press of the country. That the press has its great 
faults is too obvious for discussion. The food supply 
may be imperfect in character, and the air we breathe may 
be somewhat contaminated, but we must have our supply 
of food and drink and air, nevertheless. 

In like manner the press serves an indispensable need in 
our political life, and the public policy which gives it free- 
dom, together with that policy of government which pro- 
motes its dissemination, are to be set down as of incalculable 
benefit to the forces that are keeping alive our democratic 
institutions in their original purpose and pristine virtue, 
while modifying their working from time to time to 
meet the changing conditions of our social life. 

To sum up, then, this stage in my discussion, we seem to 
be finding the necessary solutions for the problems that 
have grown up in the natural course of our development 
due to the increased complexity of hfe, the necessary pro- 
fessionalizing of politics, and the natural pressure of large 
pecuniary interests, either to secure pohtical favor or to 
escape some disadvantage. We shall continue to have 



PARTY MACHINERY AND DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION 165 

institutional parties and professional politicians. But they 
will be checked and, in the main, controlled by the great 
mass of citizens who obtain their livelihood in private 
pursuits, yet assert their right to a part in the normal play 
of political life and force. 

Every organized interest in the community, whether 
economic or religious or of other character, will seek to 
promote its special views and interests through positive or 
negative political action. Thus, in one way or another, 
the great business corporations will continue to concern 
themselves about politics. But their attempts at a cynical 
control of the practical political life of the country through 
their financial relations with the bosses and machines of 
both parties will have to cease. Their partial withdrawal 
from politics will give a better tone to our public life, and 
this better tone will, in turn, relieve them from the more 
plausible pretexts upon which they had built up their cor- 
rupt political activity. 

For it is obvious that the corporations had been the 
victims of their own system. A professionalized political 
machine which could render improper favors to business 
corporations could also, in turn, threaten them and black- 
mail them. An improvement of political and business 
morals, making for a better social equilibrium, helps the 
sane and sober view to prevail, and tends to bring divergent 
interests together on the simple platform of fair play and 
justice to all interests. The evolution of political life 
must proceed in a certain order. It was necessary that we 
should have made this long fight for the purification of 
politics and the freedom of democratic life and expression, 
because of the new tasks to which the agencies of govern- 
ment had to be applied. 



VII 



PROBLEMS OF ECONOMIC REGULATION, ESPECIALLY THOSE 
RELATING TO RAILWAYS AND TO INDUSTRIAL MONOPOLIES 

It had been from the first a fundamental principle of 
our energetic, self-directing, and capable democracy, that 
it was not the task of government to assume the functions 
of the economic life. We held, rather, to the view that 
government should regulate conditions in such a way as 
to give to each citizen the largest range of freedom and 
initiative in his business affairs that could be made con- 
sistent with the like freedom of his fellow-citizens. In 
order to maintain this cardinal principle, it has been of 
ever increasing importance that government should main- 
tain its unquestioned supremacy; that it could be relied 
upon to dispense justice with reasonable certainty as be- 
tween conflicting private interests; that it should be able 
to grasp changing conditions and show a firm hand in 
making new applications, as occasions might require, of 
the underlying principles. 

At the very outset of our American life, it was the busi- 
ness of the government to harmonize conditions, to pro- 
mote the general welfare, to protect liberty, and to medi- 
ate between conflicting private interests. It would seem 
evident that these aspects of our governmental life and 
character could not grow less important as our economic 
life became more complex, and as private interests became 

166 



CONTROL OF RAILWAYS AND TRUSTS 167 

at once more assertive and more prone to conflict among 
themselves. And if, under these later conditions, any group 
of private interests should have fastened its clutches 
upon the political and governmental machinery for its 
own benefit as against the rest of the community, it 
would seem clear that government must, at all hazards, free 
itself from such control in order to carry on its normal 
functions. 

A large part of that recent growth of opinion in favor of 
extending the business activities of government, — with a 
view to the public ownership and operation of many forms 
of business service or economic production, — has been 
due to the belief that government could not successfully 
regulate private activities and fix the rule of justice as be- 
tween conflicting interests. Regulation of economic forces, 
for the general welfare and for the largest average free- 
dom of private initiative, is the accepted American policy. 
Absorption of economic enterprises by the government itself 
with a view to a higher social welfare is a very different 
proposal. The line between state socialism or collec- 
tivism on the one hand, and the sphere of private enterprise 
on the other hand, is not one of absolute principle. It 
may vary somewhat with practical experience. But it is 
reasonably distinct. The considerations that govern pub- 
lic policy in such matters are not always theoretical. 

Thus, in certain European countries, governments have 
come into the ownership and operation of railroads for 
reasons quite different from those that have usually been 
advocated in the United States. These European reasons 
have been largely of a military, strategical nature. They 
have also been found in the fact that — in eastern and 
southern Europe especially — public initiative was more 



168 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

highly developed than private initiative, and the only way 
to procure a system of railroads and telegraphs was to 
create it as a government service, or else to allow it to be 
exploited by capitalists from other countries on disad- 
vantageous terms. Our country, in contrast with eastern 
Europe, has come into the modern facilities of life with a 
higher development of private than of public business 
energy, and with a growth of private capital adequate 
usually to large undertakings. 

When, therefore, men have argued in this country for 
governmental operation of railroads, telegraph and tele- 
phone lines, and services of local transit, they have not, as 
a rule, complained of the lack of such modern services or 
of the insufficiency of private capital for undertakings of 
such magnitude. Their argument has generally admitted 
the magnitude and adequacy of private capital, and the 
great energy of corporations engaged in rendering such 
services. Their complaints have been of a twofold char- 
acter: first, that private interests in the control of these 
enterprises were not serving the public fairly and impar- 
tially; second, that they were interfering dangerously 
in the business of government, all the way up from the 
affairs of cities and local corporations to those of states 
and of the nation at large. 

Sometimes there are great enterprises of national mo- 
ment that private capital cannot finance: for example, 
private capital found it impossible to construct a ship canal 
either at Panama or across Nicaragua, and it was only after 
the full demonstration of such failure that the government 
of the United States undertook to provide the capital for 
that enterprise. The earlier transcontinental railroad lines 
required the loan of public credit and the grant of lands. 



CONTROL OF RAILWAYS AND TRUSTS 169 

But generally speaking, private capital and energy have 
sufficed for the creation and carrying on of all large business 
undertakings in America. Some railroad lines have been 
projected and owned by states, and some, either partially 
or wholly, by particular cities. But the uniform practice 
has been to turn over the operation of such roads to private 
companies; and the later tendency has been to transfer 
ownership, also, to private hands. 

In the period of rapid westward development, both 
before the Civil War and after it, the demand for railroad 
facilities was insatiate on the part of the new communities. 
All sorts of public and private subventions and subscrip- 
tions Yveie extended to the promoters of new railway lines. 
The railroads in turn, having been built, were eager for 
business and were ready to offer inducements to manu- 
facturers and large shippers. Special rates were promised 
to those who would locate their factories or warehouses 
along the new lines, and railroad agents sought both freight 
and passenger business by constantly changing rates to 
meet the competition of rival lines. It was a speculative 
era, during which railroads from time to time went into 
bankruptcy and submitted to processes of reorganization. 
It was inevitable that there should have arisen, finally, a 
definite conflict of interests between the Western railroads 
and certain classes of shippers. 

The farmers, for example, did not compete with one 
another, but had a definite, common interest. The differ- 
ence between the price they could get for their wheat and 
the quoted market price at Chicago or Liverpool, repre- 
sented almost exactly the price per bushel exacted by the 
transportation companies for the service they rendered. 
The position of the farmers was favorable for a contest. 



170 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

They had nothing to lose, and something to gain. They 
were the most powerful element in agricultural states like 
Minnesota and Iowa, and they proceeded to lay stress upon 
the public aspects of the railroads as common carriers. 
The Granger movement and the anti-monopoly movement 
in Western politics in the early seventies and in the 
eighties declared it to be the right of government to fix 
rates as well as to regulate, in other respects, the busi- 
ness of railroad companies. After a memorable contest 
which forms another great landmark in our political 
history, the railroad policies of these Western states were 
upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. 

With the development of the country, the question of 
excessive rates became less acute. Contrary to their ex- 
pressed fears, the railroad companies did not find any dis- 
position upon the part of the states to use the rate-making 
power in a confiscatory, or even in a radical, spirit. Mean- 
while, the railroad systems were growing more extended, 
and many of the more difficult questions of regulation lay 
outside of the sphere of individual states. Then was called 
into a new use the power conferred by the Constitution 
upon Congress to regulate commerce between the states. 
In this respect, as in many others, the founders of our 
government builded better than they knew. They had 
laid down a broad principle capable of many unexpected 
future applications, but not likely to be invoked for im- 
proper uses. 

Surely, one of the chief purposes of modern government 
is to regulate the play of economic forces. The states, 
respectively, are at liberty to fix the conditions under 
which business life is carried on within their borders. But 
the founders of the general government were creating a 



CONTROL OF RAILWAYS AND TRUSTS 171 

great nation within the boundaries of which there was to be 
a free and unhampered economic life. Any proper regula- 
tion of the conditions of trade and commerce on the inter- 
state or national plane must necessarily belong to the 
national government. Such a power would have belonged 
to the national authorities by necessary inference, even if 
it had not been expressly conferred in the Constitution. 

The need of a national regulation of railroads found 
definite expression in the enactment of the original Inter- 
state Commerce Law of 1887, and the creation of the Inter- 
state Commerce Commission. Besides various powers of 
inquiry and regulation conferred upon the commission, was 
the power to declare particular rates unreasonable, subject 
to a final action by the United States courts. The law 
forbade discriminations in rates and treatment for or 
against individual shippers. It undertook to protect locali- 
ties against harmful treatment under its famous " long and 
short haul" clauses. It also forbade the system of "pool- 
ing" which had grown up among the competing trunk 
lines, — a method by which they had endeavored to break 
up the ruinous practice of rate-cutting, and to remove the 
pressure of competition by equitably dividing the through 
business. 

The private rather than the public aspects of railroad 
investment and operation had, as a rule, accorded with 
the American way of thinking. But the new producing 
interests of the West had forced the public view upon the 
country, had carried legislatures and federal courts, and 
had at length secured national railroad regulation. Fol- 
lowing the fight for reduction of excessive rates on farm 
products, came that for fair treatment of growing towns 
along the raihoad lines which were disadvantaged by the 



172 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

more favorable through rates accorded to the larger cen- 
ters where railroad competition existed. The next stage 
in the struggle for equitable railroad service came with 
the demand of smaller shippers for protection against the 
unfair advantages accorded to their larger competitors in 
business. 

In the earlier days, every manufacturer or more extensive 
shipper of commodities had negotiated for as favorable a 
rate as possible, and favors generally took the form of 
rebates and discounts. The more important the shipper, 
generally speaking, the larger the rebate. The system 
grew up naturally in the process of creating new communi- 
ties. Favorable rates were accorded as an inducement to 
locate business enterprises along a given hne. But, as the 
country matured, the system became intolerable. It was 
extremely difficult to bring railroad men to the perception 
of the fact that their business was not a private one in the 
sense of justifying these discriminations. After stringent 
state and national laws had been enacted, the discrimina- 
tions were continued in secret ways and by all sorts of 
indirect and evasive practices. The large shippers had 
grown so powerful in many cases that they were in a posi- 
tion to make threats, if not absolutely to dictate terms. 

The practice of favoritism, furthermore, had so blunted 
the moral perception of the average railroad official, that 
it became a somewhat usual practice for officers and 
others connected with the management of railroads to 
hold stock in coal mines, grain elevator lines, and various 
other enterprises, which they were able to serve to great 
advantage, not only by the granting of better rates than 
were given to competing businesses, but also by a prompt 
supply of cars and facilities, whereas competitors were 



CONTROL OF RAILWAYS AND TRUSTS 173 

subject to delay and neglect. This practice on the part 
of railroad men of turning aside from their strict duties as 
common carriers in order to traffic in the commodities 
handled by their roads, could but lead to a further loss 
of moral perception; and the same set of officials fell 
into a series of practices distinctly harmful to their own 
stockholders. 

Thus, in many instances, they detached more profitable 
forms of traffic from the general business of the company 
and carried them on by means of so-called "fast freight 
lines," in which they themselves held the stock. They 
set up separate interests in terminal facilities here and there ; 
they built short lines of railway as so-called "feeders" and 
sold them to the main company at a private profit. In a 
variety of other ways, they managed to deprive the stock- 
holders of the road of benefits which, under strictly honor- 
able management, should have been theirs. 

Meanwhile, the opportunities afforded by rebates and 
discriminations in favor of large shippers had been pro- 
ducing their natm'al effects. In a country so vast as ours, 
with such abimdance and variety of resources, there was 
needed no extraordinary business acumen to develop enter- 
prises upon a vast scale, if conditions in a given case were 
so favorable as to put all competitors at a serious disad- 
vantage. A protective tariff which kept rates so high as to 
prohibit effective outside competition in many lines of pro- 
duction, might, indeed, have been favorable to the develop- 
ment of domestic monopoly in some cases. But the tariff 
could not ordinarily affect the conditions of competition 
among home producers. There were many iron-masters 
in the land benefited alike by the protective tariff. If a 
few iron-masters grew enormously rich because they were 



174 POLITICAL- PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

able to take orders for railroad iron and other supplies at a 
price lower than their competitors could make, there must 
have been some other reason for it. There were many 
prosperous refiners of petroleum, and the oil fields were 
somewhat widely scattered. If one company or amalgama- 
tion was able to drive competitors out of business and by 
degrees control the whole field, where the more obvious 
conditions of supply and distribution were so simple, and 
where no patented invention or peculiar skill of industrial 
process was involved, there must have been a reason in 
the natui'e of some marked special advantage. 

It seems to be a matter of history, disputed by nobody, 
that certain firms or companies in the early seventies had 
bargains with leading railroads which gave them rates 
from 25 to 50 per cent less than those accorded to smaller 
competitors. Doubtless, they were able business men 
who could have secured these advantages in a period 
when everybody was bargaining for rates and obtaining 
aU the privileges possible. It is, nevertheless, a fact be- 
yond dispute that the vast development of the business of 
so-called trusts owed much to enormous advantages in 
the shipment of their commodities. 

It is far from my purpose to say these things in the 
spirit of an indictment against those who benefited by 
these incalculable railroad advantages. The sovereigns 
of European states in earlier periods were accustomed to 
grant certain monopoly privileges to subjects who had won 
their favor. But never in all human history were any such 
priceless monopoly privileges conferred upon any man or 
any company of men as when the railroads of this con- 
tinental republic gave favors which enabled particular 
groups or individuals to command the fields of supply, to 



CONTROL OF RAILWAYS AND TRUSTS 175 

fix wholesale and retail prices, and to control the consum- 
ing markets for various articles which came into universal 
use. This obviously applies to commodities like petro- 
leum and anthracite coal. 

It is equally plain that men dealing in iron and steel 
products in that earlier period could lay the foundation of 
great fortunes if they were lucky enough to secure better 
shipping arrangements than their competitors. Again, it 
requires no unusual acumen to perceive that stupendous 
organizations and vast fortunes could have been built up 
by firms and companies which acquired a practical control 
of the great business of buying and slaughtering Western 
cattle and hogs and distributing meat products, where the 
railroad rates were decidedly in their favor and they were 
allowed, in addition, to operate their own lines of cars. 

The companies that were authorized to establish systems 
of grain elevators, — with warehouses at every station for 
hundreds of miles through a country devoted to wheat and 
other cereals, — aided by low rates and a constant supply 
of cars, were assuredly in a position to estabhsh a profitable 
monopoly. The relation of railroads to the anthracite coal 
district of Pennsylvania and to certain bituminous coal 
districts elsewhere, afforded further instances of a discrimi- 
nating system which it is not my piu-pose to illustrate 
exhaustively. 

I am presenting these matters in their bearing upon the 
problems of American politics. Railway discrimination, 
perhaps, more than any other circumstance, created the 
larger business enterprises of a more or less monopolistic 
character, popularly known as trusts and combinations. In 
any case we should have had a vast business development, 
with many large individual undertakings, by reason of the 



176 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

greatness of the country and the magnitude of its oppor- 
tunities. It was raihoad favors, however, more than 
anything else, that enabled a particular combination here 
and there to assume undue proportions and to absorb its 
competitors or even to destroy them, in a period when 
otherwise they could all have carried on a profitable busi- 
ness. 

The two questions of railroad control and the checking 
or regulation of industrial monopoly have made their way 
in very close association with one another. It was as a 
result of public investigations of the Standard Oil Com- 
pany and other large enterprises that the Interstate Com- 
merce Act of 1887 was followed by the Sherman Anti-Trust 
Law of 1890. Both of these conspicuous enactments were 
intended to have an effect upon railroad management and 
upon the monopolistic tendency of industry and trade. 
The trusts and combinations, however, were growing so 
powerful and so rich that they were putting their surplus 
capital into railroad investments, and their leading spirits 
were becoming railroad directors. A condition had grown 
up which was making it difficult to force the railroads into 
compliance with the spirit and intent of the laws requiring 
them to render impartial service to all their patrons. 

Meanwhile, the situation was assuming unexpected phases 
through court interpretations and through the character 
of the more or less spasmodic efforts of executive officers to 
enforce the laws. The Sherman Anti-Trust Law had for- 
bidden agreements in restraint of trade. The courts de- 
cided that this forbade even a useful kind of understanding 
between railroads to maintain reasonable and standard 
rates and to serve the public beneficially. The effect of 
the two laws taken together was to cause the railroads 



CONTROL OF RAILWAYS AND TRUSTS 177 

to create a so-called "community of interest" by making 
joint investment in competing lines and in other ways. 
And, in a series of rapid developments, many hundreds of 
separate railroad companies and lines became fused into 
a half-dozen great financial and operating systems, each 
falling under the direction and control of one so-called 
"magnate" or else of a small group of men. 

In its fundamental nature, the transportation business 
is only to a very limited extent competitive. From the 
earliest times, the principles affecting common carriers have 
been those of an equal and fair treatment of the public, with 
an appropriate and decent quality of service at standard 
and reasonable prices. A certain possibility of competition, 
direct or indirect, must evidently have a wholesome effect 
upon the business of the common carrier, in that it stimu- 
lates his energy to the end of a more efficient rendering 
of public service. But since the public interest in the 
business of transportation is always greater and more es- 
sential than any private interest, it is both right and neces- 
sary that there should be direct public supervision and 
regulation. 

For a time there was confusion in the public mind and a 
determination to break up large railroad systems into their 
constituent parts, and to compel them by due process of 
law to set themselves into competitive array, and thereby 
the better to serve the people who patronized them. Even 
the judges who wrote opinions in railroad cases were evi- 
dently affected by this notion that an earlier sort of compe- 
tition could be made to work effectively as against the later 
principles of unity and harmony. But, in the main, that 
idea has lost its hold upon the minds of more thoughtful 
men. The regulative power of government must apply 



178 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

directly, in order to see that all interests are fairly served 
by the great highways of travel and trade. 

At times there have been complaints of particular rates 
whether for passengers or certain classes of freight, as ex- 
cessive. But, in general, American railroad rates have not 
been regarded as so high upon the average as to place a 
harmful tax upon the larger movements of trade. The 
great effort of the leaders who have sought through politics 
and government to regulate the railroads, has been directed 
toward securing an impartial service. In view of the more 
recent development of large systems, and the disappearance 
of certain phases of competition, it has also become a 
leading object of public regulation to secure an ample and 
efficient, as well as an impartial, service. Further than that, 
it is a recognized function of government in its relation to 
railroads to promote the safety of the traveling public and 
of employees by compelling the less careful and enterprising 
companies to adopt the methods and standards of the more 
advanced, in the use of safety appliances and in the treat- 
ment of employees as respects their hours of labor and their 
protection against needless accident. 

In the course of the long struggle for the public regula- 
tion of railroads, it is natural enough that all interests con- 
cerned should have formed themselves into compact groups 
with a view to participation in poHtical life. The farmers 
in the seventies and eighties were able to enforce their de- 
mands because of the absolute solidarity of their interests and 
the definiteness and simplicity of their aims. Through the 
Granger movement and other organizations they controlled 
legislatures and brought a pressure to bear that was some- 
times unduly hostile against the transportation companies, 
by virtue of whose enterprise the Western agricultural 



CONTROL OF RAILWAYS AND TRUSTS 179 

communities had been created. The railroad interests, in 
turn, became a powerful factor in political life. They were 
in position to retain the services of influential lawyers in 
every county of the Western states, and through a liberal 
policy in the granting of free passes and the placing of 
advertising they learned how to acquire a considerable 
influence over the local newspapers. 

As poHtical life and work tended to become systematized 
in party machines, the railroad interests learned to organize 
their own well-paid political agencies for service in the odd 
years as well as in election years. And since professional- 
ized politics is based upon money, the railroads learned 
how to maintain close relations with the dominant party 
machines. 

The motives of railroad capitalists in their political 
activities were not necessarily corrupt. They felt that 
hostile interests were organized to tax railways, to lower 
rates, to make vexatious exactions, and, sometimes, to 
levy blackmail. Not only the great agricultural organiza- 
tions, but also the labor-imions were in position to attack 
corporations by political methods. The general public, 
consisting of the ordinary travelers and the ordinary ship- 
pers, being largely dependent upon railroads, were naturally 
critical and ready to make demands of one kind and another 
upon the railroad managers. The railroads' own employees 
were organized in compact groups and able to exert politi- 
cal influence at critical moments of dispute with their em- 
ployers. 

What, under these complicated conditions, is the true func- 
tion and the practical duty of government in the American 
state and nation ? There are to-day great leaders of popu- 
lar opinion and party organization who declare that there 



180 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

is no solution of the railroad question short of a revolu- 
tionary change of policy as respects the scope of govern- 
ment. They hold that the nation itself must acquire and 
operate the interstate network of railroads, and that the 
states must acquire and operate the local branches and 
minor network of roads connecting with the great lines. 
Against this doctrine of innovation — with its hundreds of 
thousands, perhaps millions, of adherents — there are two 
distinct forms of political opposition. 

One of these forms is based upon the view that the rail- 
road business is essentially private, that government should 
let it alone, and that the best ends of American economic 
life will be served by leaving economic forces unrestricted. 
This is the view of the railroad owners and managers them- 
selves, together with that of the trusts and corporations; 
and it is supported either openly or secretly by groups of 
politicians, regardless of party, who have found the alli- 
ance between politics and corporations a profitable one for 
their own purposes. 

The other opposing view holds fast to the doctrine that 
railroads are necessary public highways, the impartial use 
of which must be maintained, but that the practical business 
of operating railroads belongs in the domain of private 
enterprise. With this view is associated the idea that a 
quasi-public service of universal importance requires pub- 
licity in its financial transactions as well as in its operating 
methods. Since railroads are granted franchises to per- 
form a public service, and are accorded a limited power of 
eminent domain, it is held that government may justly 
supervise them to the end that they shall perform well the 
services for the sake of which they were chartered. 

In detail these tasks of public regulation are difficult. 



CONTROL OF RAILWAYS AND TRUSTS 181 

They can never be performed in a perfect way. But it is 
to be remembered that the margin of difference within 
which government has to operate is usually narrow, be- 
cause of the balancing of natural forces in the business 
world. As a matter of practice, it has been found that 
government does not need to play an arbitrary role with 
respect to the fixing of rates; that it has only to enforce 
the reasonable standards of civilized life in its demand for 
safety appliances; and that in its endeavor to abolish the 
evils of rebating and discrimination, it is only lending its 
aid to those evolving forces of a maturing business life 
which, in any case, must have found that a fair and impar- 
tial treatment of all shippers comes in the end to be a 
necessity from every standpoint. 

I am well aware that in the very statement I have made 
of the opposing views, I have revealed my own opinions. 
Recent legislation has increased the power and authority 
of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and there is evi- 
dence of a greatly enhanced activity on the part of railroad 
commissions in many of the states. There would seem no 
good reason to believe that the final triumph of govern- 
ment in its determination to regulate railroads in the 
public interest, would be otherwise than beneficial, in the 
long run, to all the various interests whose rights are con- 
cerned and who must look to government as the final 
arbiter. National charters to interstate railways, with na- 
tional control of new issues of stocks and bonds, are quite 
as desirable for all concerned, — including the railway com- 
panies themselves, — as the power to regulate rates. 

It is one thing to check abnormal tendencies, and to help 
maintain a true balance between diverse social and busi- 
ness interests, and a wholly different thing to absorb any 



182 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

of those interests for public exploitation. That the Ameri- 
can people could, if they chose, turn their government into 
a vast public-service corporation for the carrying on of the 
railroad, the telegraph, the telephone, and other businesses 
necessary to the general welfare, I have no doubt. Gov- 
ernment ownership might to some extent ■ relieve the 
pohtical life from a commerciaHzed and a corrupting 
tendency. 

It is conceivable, indeed, that government could operate 
a few essentially public services, which are fundamental to 
other business enterprises, and go no further. It could so 
exploit them as to favor the general freedom of economic 
opportunity and to promote the diffusion rather than the 
concentration of wealth. But with all its merits, oiu" gov- 
ernment is not as yet a successful business agency. It 
ought not to operate railroads if private enterprise can and 
will operate them efficiently and impartially. 

It is often the case that great reforms come about of 
themselves in the mere fullness of time through the ripen- 
ing of conditions. Action is followed by reaction. Exces- 
sive immigration finds its own natural check at the very 
moment when we are about to put up the barriers. The 
worst evils of railway mismanagement are tending to dis- 
appear through the cooperation of all forces, public and 
private. The railroad companies do not wish to play a 
losing game in politics, and they are ready to meet their 
adversaries fully halfway on a platform of fair treatment 
to every interest. As for the trusts and corporations, they 
have made complete surrender as respects unfair railroad 
advantages. 

The true policy of government in its dealing with these 
industrial undertakings of national and international scope. 



CONTROL OF RAILWAYS AND TRUSTS 183 

must be worked out in the light of experience. Mr. Bryan 
and his adherents declare that every large business corpora- 
tion of a monopolistic character must be destroyed. The 
existing law forbids combinations in restraint of trade. 
Since few of the great trusts and corporations occupy the 
entire field, the public attitude toward them must depend 
to some extent upon their reaj conduct toward, and effect 
upon, other corporations or other individuals engaged in 
like forms of business. 

It is clear that there must be large knowledge of the 
working of these newer forms of business activity. I must, 
therefore, call attention to the creation of the Department of 
Commerce and Labor, with its investigating Bureau of 
Corporations, in the year 1903, as another landmark in 
our poHtical history. It is the growing opinion that the 
government should not only have the power to investigate 
the methods of great corporations doing an interstate busi- 
ness, and to prosecute them where they oppress or restrain 
others in legitimate business enterprises, but that it should 
also be able to enforce a more complete pubhcity in respect 
to their corporate finances and their general methods, and 
that through some form of national licensing or incorpora- 
tion, it should be better able to supervise them as large 
factors in national commerce. 

Competition will long remain as a powerful stimulus in 
the economic sphere. Yet, in many fields of activity, as 
business has increased in magnitude, competition of the 
old sort has proved too wasteful and has become obsolete. 
In many private or ordinary industries, as well as in the 
quasi-public business of railroads, we have entered an era 
of combination and, comparatively speaking, of non-com- 
petitive economic life. 



184 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

If the government had been more far-seeing and alert 
at an earlier period, we should have accomplished these 
economic transitions with less political and social distur- 
bance. If railroad discrimination had never been prac- 
tised, we should still have come into a period of large 
industrial combinations, but with a much greater diffusion 
of ownership. The railroads and the financial institu- 
tions of a country like France belong, not to their officers 
and directors, but to millions of small investors. 

If government in America had more carefully regulated 
the conditions of economic life, in order to maintain equality 
of opportunity, it would have been scarcely possible for 
those disturbances to have arisen which are due partly to 
the over-development of particular corporations, and partly 
to the undue extent of the personal fortunes and corporate 
control of particular individuals. I have shown in earlier 
chapters that a more far-reaching public policy would have 
saved us, in part, from the political difficulties growing out 
of the race question, and from the economic antagonisms 
that brought on the war between the states. I have tried 
to prove that a more statesmanlike policy as respects the 
sources of natural wealth in our public domain would have 
inured to the benefit of the national treasury, and prevented 
some of those harmful inequalities of fortune due to the 
acquirement by private interests of the iron ore deposits, 
the petroleum fields, the coal belts, the timber areas, and 
certain other factors of national enrichment, which only 
recently were the property of all the people, but which, 
through a slack and negligent public policy, have now 
become monopolized in the hands of a few, and are the 
sources of colossal private fortunes. In like manner, it is 
easy enough now to see that lines of public policy — wholly 



CONTROL OP RAILWAYS AND TRUSTS 185 

equitable and in accord with our general principles of free- 
dom and equality — would have prevented the develop- 
ment of the larger trusts and combinations, at least in the 
forms they have now assumed, with stupendous individual 
fortunes as the key to their economic methods. 

The diversion of economic resources and social wealth, 
to so large an extent, into the hands of a comparatively 
small number of people, has been in the main due to the 
failure of government to exercise strictly and wisely its 
functions as a supervisor and regulator of conflicting 
economic interests. It does not follow that these neglects 
and mistakes have resulted in conditions in any manner 
fatal to our future welfare, political or economic. Certain 
counteracting tendencies must be encouraged, and the 
further concentration of wealth must not be facilitated 
through the sheer failure of government to protect the 
ordinary citizen from spoliation. 

It still remains, as I have repeatedly said, the business 
of government in America to build up a homogeneous, well- 
conditioned citizenship. Wealth is not to be discouraged, 
but on the contrary, the application of capital to the 
development of our resources and the further creation of 
wealth, both for enlarging the average means of living and 
for adding to the sum total of productive capital, must in 
every reasonable way be fostered. To this end the gov- 
ernment will spread enlightenment as to the best ways to 
increase our agricultural output. The geological survey 
will render its invaluable aid to mineral development. 
Through the reclamation service and all the other policies 
that relate to the public domain, the national wealth will 
be further promoted. 

There will remain ample opportunity for the acquisition 



186 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

of large fortunes. But this opportunity must not be at 
the expense of the man who would otherwise have an oppor- 
tunity to acquire, through his own efforts, a moderate for- 
tune. So tremendous and tumultuous are the present-day 
forces of the economic life, that both now and for years to 
come it will be difficult to make wise application of those 
principles of regulation and control that belong to govern- 
ment. With the great trusts and corporations well organ- 
ized to secure their hearing and to present their case at 
the political tribunal, we have, on the other hand, the 
federated bodies of labor-unions, with large power intrusted 
to central officers, equally able to state their case and pre- 
sent their demands to those in political authority. Gov- 
ernment must ever hold the man as more important than 
the dollar. Equal suffrage and the rule of the majority, 
in a democratic state, put the balance of power in the 
hands of the plain people, as against any narrower interests, 
whether of wealth or of class. 

It is convenient for purposes of discussion — as well as 
for the judges of our state courts in times of need — to 
have resort to old principles of common law. Thus we 
have revived the almost forgotten rules affecting common 
carriers, monopolies, and so-called "conspiracies." But it 
is necessary to have in mind the vast change in real con- 
ditions. Transportation in earlier times was unimportant. 
Families and communities being well-nigh self-sufficient in 
their economic concerns, the common carrier had only a 
limited function to perform. Since then, the industrial 
application of steam power has revolutionized all the con- 
ditions of life. It has brought about division of labor, with 
concentration of industry and trade; and the exchange of 
commodities throughout extensive areas has become the 



CONTROL OF RAILWAYS AND TRUSTS 187 

most essential of economic processes. Thus, transportation 
emerges as a separate and vital industry, upon which all 
other industries are dependent, and its public character 
cannot be neglected. 

With the further development of these modern conditions 
in business, there came of necessity the vast development 
of capital devoted to railroads, and to the kinds of industry 
dependent upon transportation. Monopoly, in its earlier 
forms, was due to some special advantage or arbitrary 
privilege. But, in its later forms, it has been due to the 
natural working of economic laws. As I have attempted to 
point out, in the period of rapid development the larger 
shippers secured the best transportation facilities, and thus 
grew toward monopolistic proportions with undue rapidity 
and by undesirable means. But in Germany and other 
countries where railroad discrimination has not existed, the 
tendency to large combination in standard fields of in- 
dustrial production has been almost as great as in the 
United States. 

This change in economic conditions, due to modern in- 
ventions and the increase of productive capital, has given 
a wholly transformed character to certain political and 
governmental problems. In the earlier period it was a 
small and incidental part of the work of our state govern- 
ments to regulate common carriers; it was to be classed 
with such functions as the oversight of inns and pub- 
lic-houses. In those days, the protection of the public 
against extortion by monopoly, or against conspiracies 
in restraint of trade, was to be classed with such matters 
as the regulation of usury and of pawnbroking. In point 
of fact, the protection of the borrower against the 
exactions of the money-lender, and such reforms as the 



188 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

abolition of imprisonment for debt, were regarded as of 
vastly more importance than the protection of the public 
against any form of industrial combination or monopoly. 

The innnediate problem of government is to permit 
natural development, while lessening incitiental evils. The 
transitional tlisturbances and restraints due to such devel- 
opment are serious ; and to meet them there is a movement 
of opinion in favor of harsh and arbitrary restraints to be 
embodied in legislation. But the temptation to make such 
enactments should be resisted. Transportation, for ex- 
ample, is a great industry which tends toward harmony. 
Competition in such services brings about the very dis- 
criminations that the opponents of railway combination 
so strongly condemn. The telegraph and telephone, local 
transit, gas and electric lighting, ai'e instances of services 
that ai'O monopolistic in their nature, while public in their 
essential chai'acter; and for the present in this coimtry 
they are not to be regulated by the forces of a wasteful 
and outgrown competition, nor are they of necessity to be 
taken possession of and operated as governmental insti- 
tutions. 

Meanwhile, there is no standai'd of ideal justice by which 
to determine precisely how far government is to go in regu- 
lating and controlling these quasi-public services. At the 
risk of repetition, let me say again that the margin of 
difference within which government must act is compara- 
tively naiTow, as a rule. Government should be alert, in- 
telligent, and responsive; but with a highly developed 
citizenship, government may not have to be very aggres- 
sive. In the exercise of its latent power to make rates, for 
example, government should not, as a rule, anticipate. It 
sliould leave quasi-public corporations to adjust their own 



CONTROL OF RAILWAYS AND TRUSTS 189 

rates, and carry on business in their own way, until clearly 
defined and important interests make definite complaints; 
in which case government will endeavor to act as final 
arbiter in a spirit of justice. 

Where industries not having the quasi-public character 
of railroads are concerned, some, in the nature of the case, 
tend to vast combination, while others give much larger 
room for the play of old-time competition. Science is con- 
stantly changing the character of industrial processes; and 
competition appears, disappears, and reappears, in fields 
where combination or monopoly had been thought to have 
gained firm control. Government must do its utmost to 
maintain freedom of exchange, freedom of opportunity, and 
wide publicity. There must be unremitting effort to destroy 
every phase of corrupt relationship between great business 
enterprises and the forces of politics and government. 
But government can only moderate, protect, and main- 
tain economic order. 

President Roosevelt in his recent messages to Congress 
has made it clear that the present administration does not 
believe that government can successfully check the normal 
development of combination in business; and it has been 
shown by the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Attor- 
ney-General, and the Department of Commerce, that the 
present laws, as the courts have interpreted them, could 
not be strictly and fully enforced without great harm. 
There are certain forms of agreement in the field of 
railroad transportation that are desirable, and that the 
Interstate Commerce Commission would be ready to sanc- 
tion, provided they were given full publicity. 

As regards the great industrial trusts and combina- 
tions, the officials charged with the administration of the 



190 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

Sherman Anti-Trust Law make a sharp distinction be- 
tween combination itself and certain improper methods 
and practices by virtue of which combination may inter- 
fere harmfully with the reasonable economic freedom of 
other producers in the same field, or with the rights and 
interests of the consuming public. Thus a line of public 
policy has been gradually evolved, under the present gov- 
erning authorities of this country, which looks not merely 
toward the wholesome enforcement of law to break up 
harmful practices, — whether in the field of transporta- 
tion or in that of industrial combination, — but which 
also shows how the law may be safely modified for the 
sake of a desirable freedom of activity in the economic 
world. 

As against the policy which stands for great moderation 
in the making of laws, but high vigilance in their enforce- 
ment, is the policy which is represented by many sincere 
and influential leaders of political thought and action. 
This policy would transfer to the government the colossal 
business of operating the railroads, and it would meet the 
movement for combination in trade and industry by strin- 
gent artificial checks. An example of such check is to be 
found in the proposal that all corporations engaged in 
interstate commerce should be compelled to secure a federal 
charter or license imder the specific terms of which they 
would be limited to a certain percentage of the total busi- 
ness of the country in their particular field. 

These two lines of opposing policy are emerging in a 
clear, distinct way from the fog and confusion of many side 
issues. Each policy has its difficulties and its political 
problems, Mr. Roosevelt's policy requires constant effort 
to overcome the systematic pohtical pressure of corrupt 



CONTROL OF RAILWAYS AND TRUSTS 191 

corporation influences in political life. It is a difficult 
task to keep the government in a condition so strong 
and so free from undue influence that it can maintain its 
supremacy and regulate the mighty forces of economic life 
that are ever contending for greater mastery. 

Furthermore, the American mind, like the French mind, 
and unlike the English, loves to see clear and definite solu- 
tions, and is tempted to follow maxims and generalized 
statements. But the Roosevelt policy, which says that 
railroads are at once public institutions of vital concern 
and private business enterprises, in which capital must be 
allowed its fair chance to secure profitable results, makes 
it largely a matter of experiment from time to time to 
discover the just degree and method of public control. 

Furthermore, it is the Roosevelt doctrine that, outside 
of quasi-public corporations, there are some trusts and 
combinations that are good and some that are bad, and that 
the efforts of government must be made to conform to the 
facts and conditions of the expanding economic life of the 
nation. But this is a statement of the case which fails to 
satisfy the mind that seeks to discover conclusive and final 
remedies for economic evils. The Roosevelt view is one 
that imposes the duty of moderation and care upon the 
lawmakers. It forces unremitting vigilance and effort 
upon the executive departments, as well as high character 
and intelligence. It looks to an increased range of responsi- 
biUty for judges and juries. From the political standpoint, 
it has the disadvantage of being merely a policy of patience, 
conservatism, and high public efficiency, at a moment 
when the atmosphere of politics is heavily charged with 
the electric forces of radicalism. 

The opposing policy, represented by such prominent 



192 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

leadership as that of Mr. Bryan, has for purposes of argu- 
ment some of the advantages that go with clear maxims 
and the promise of definite solutions. It seems a clearer 
and easier statement to say that all monopoly and combi- 
nation is evil and must be destroyed, than to analyze and 
discriminate and qualify. And to say that the public 
interest in railroads has become so fundamental that the 
lines must be operated by the government in order to 
keep free competition alive in all other directions, and in 
order to preserve our democratic institutions from control 
at the hands of corrupt corporations, is a position that 
lends itself most invitingly to the purposes of political 
argument. 

It is to be expected that these issues must be faced by 
the people of the country at the polls in great national con- 
tests of the near future. They are likely to become issues 
of greater consequence and magnitude than the tariff ques- 
tion, or the question of aiding in the secure and orderly 
exchanges of business by means of a good system of money 
and banking. It is true that the tariff question has played 
a great part in our political controversies of the past ; and 
that the money question has had a similar place in our 
poHtical history, — while both have had real importance 
in our economic progress as well as in our governmental 
and political life. 

But while the adoption of one policy or another in 
respect to the tariff or the currency may considerably 
affect the conditions under which private business 
is carried on, — just as a regulation of common carriers 
may also affect the conditions of private business, — it is 
plain that tariff and currency policies may be changed from 
time to time, and do not involve deeply the nature or 



CXDNTROL OF RAILWAYS AND TRUSTS 193 

functions of government. The direct operation of the 
raihoads of the United States, on the other hand, would 
mean, in practical effect, a vast extension of the public 
service in a new and unaccustomed direction, and a policy 
that could not be readily changed, like an outgrown tariff 
or an imperfect system of currency. 



VIII 



THE TARIFF, QUESTIONS OF TAXATION, AND PROBLEMS 
OF MONEY AND CURRENCY IN OUR POLITICS 

The part that the tariff question has played in our 
political history has been due less to its intrinsic importance 
than to the relation it has borne to certain other contro- 
versies. Its exaggerated role must also be interpreted in 
the light of an understanding of the American political 
mind, with its doctrinaire tendencies and its argumentative 
habit. There has not been a village or a cross-roads ham- 
let in the United States, however small, which has not 
possessed for several generations its free-traders and its 
protectionists, accustomed to debate this subject from 
boyhood to old age as a foremost intellectual diversion. 
Thus the tariff question has outranked even the money 
question or the race question as affording subject-matter 
of debate and controversy in that universal and unending 
practice of popular discussion of public affairs which plays 
so large a part in the national life and in the training of 
American citizenship. 

As I have already remarked in discussing the regulation 
of railroads and of monopolistic industrial tendencies, the 
normal play of government in such matters is confined to 
rather narrow limits. Economic forces of themselves bring 
about certain balances and adjustments that need only a 

194 



PROBLEMS OF TARIFF AND OF MONEY 195 

moderate amount of assistance at the hands of the state. 
Government can fix certain large antecedent conditions, 
can be dominated by certain far-reaching motives, and can 
afterward — by experimental changes of method or 
policy — affect somewhat the rapidity of economic devel- 
opment. What is true of railroad regulation is equally 
true of those phases of the tariff question which have been 
brought into political controversy. 

The starting-point for a just imderstanding of American 
tariff policy is to be found in the conditions and purposes 
of our building of a new nation. The great steps in the 
early period were, not the placing of import taxes of a 
more or less discriminating kind upon foreign goods, but, 
first, the nationalizing of commerce by the establishment 
of free trade among all the states; second, the acquisition 
by the national government of the sole power to levy taxes 
upon imports; and third, the prohibition of taxes upon 
exports. We were not setting out to show the world an 
experiment in protectionism, but rather to show how we 
might develop a continent dedicated to the practice of 
free trade. Our business was to create a new country, in 
a period when nationality everywhere was a matter not 
merely political, but also of commercial and industrial 
significance. 

Through its laws and policies every government of Europe 
had made an economic as well as a political entity of its 
domains; and we could not have done otherwise. Mr. 
Hamilton, in his famous report on manufactures, set forth 
in an impressive way the reasons why the tariff should be 
so arranged as to give incidental encouragement to the 
growth of varied industries in our new country. We were 
then a maritime people, nearly all of our population living 



196 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

within a hundred miles of the Atlantic seaboard. Our 
shipping and our foreign commerce were our largest inter- 
ests. There was no justification at that time for a tariff 
policy that would sharply have checked importation and 
ocean traflfic. It was enough merely to aid somewhat a 
tendency toward the beginnings of our manufacturing 
growth. 

The War of 1812 so seriously interrupted our foreign 
trade as to demonstrate the need of a certain degree of 
independence in the production of the more necessary arti- 
cles of industry, especially textiles; and hence the tariff 
of 1816, which was broadly protective, with duties upon 
some kinds of woven goods, for example, as high as 30 
per cent of their value. By successive enactments, the 
average rates of protective duties were increased until 
1833, when a compromise tariff, providing for gradual 
reductions, was adopted, and in 1842, while we were still 
on the protective basis, the rates were comparatively 
low. 

In 1846 an ad valorem revenue tariff was adopted, gen- 
erally referred to as the "Free Trade Tariff," although a 
good deal of incidental protection lurked behind its rates. 
This was further reduced in 1857. But with the advent of 
a Republican administration and the outbreak of the war, 
there was adopted the Morrill tariff of 1861, largely pro- 
tectionist in its theory, while designed especially to pro- 
cure revenue for the government in a period of extreme 
fiscal emergency. 

The change of policy during the twenty or twenty-five 
years preceding the war was due chiefly to the sharp diver- 
gence of interests between the North and South produced 
by the expansion of cotton growing under the slavery 



PROBLEMS OF TARIFF AND OF MONEY 197 

system. The invention of the cotton-gin had, for the time 
being, revolutionized agriculture and commerce in the 
South. It had affected the world as profoundly in that 
period as the tremendous expansion of Northwestern wheat 
and corn production in the seventies and eighties dis- 
turbed the economic conditions of the world a genera- 
tion later. It was to the clear advantage of the South, 
at least from the momentary standpoint, to form an alli- 
ance with the manufacturing interest of England rather 
than with that of our own Northeast. 

It was just at this time that the British manufacturers — 
largely those of the textile industries and especially of the 
cotton spinning and weaving districts — had prevailed 
over the land-owning interest and secured the repeal of 
the corn laws. They were obtaining cotton in great 
quantities in consequence of the development of our 
Southern states; and with the opportimity to import free 
food, these English manufacturers were in a position more 
than ever to dominate the markets of the world. What- 
ever helped the development of the Manchester district in 
England, seemed to be good for the Southern cotton raiser ; 
and it was obviously against the interest of the British 
textile manufacturer to have the United States maintain 
its earlier protective policy. 

But for extreme sectional antagonisms, — due far more 
to the slavery system than to the fact that Eui-ope was 
chief customer for the cotton crop, — the tariff question 
would not have played so bitter a part in politics, and the 
tariff laws would not have varied so much with the rise 
and fall of parties. The circumstances which had enabled 
the slave-holding power of the South to control the Demo- 
cratic party of the country for other purposes during the 



198 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

period before the war, enabled it also to control that party's 
action upon the tariff. 

The war for the Union was waged by the North in a 
spirit of intense nationalism. All the earlier arguments for 
varied industries and national economic independence were 
intensified many fold. The policies that promoted the 
building of the Pacific railways and the opening up of the 
Western lands were scarcely separable in motive from 
the policy which maintained high protective duties for 
the benefit of American manufactures. As I have said in 
previous chapters, the period that followed the war was one 
of stupendous individual and social energy. It witnessed 
a great spreading out of the American stock over wide 
areas, and the absorption into our body politic of millions 
of strangers from Europe. A protective tariff at such 
epochs of national development is to be regarded as an 
effect rather than a cause. It was an arrangement that 
blended with all the policies and all the tendencies of the 
time for bringing about swift expansion and high develop- 
ment in a new country. 

Under the device of a discriminating tariff, European 
capital by the hundreds of millions of dollars was transferred 
to this country to engage in iron and steel, textile, and 
many other kinds of manufacturing, and to help build and 
equip the railroads that were distributing the products of 
industry as well as those of agriculture. The tariff policy 
had a direct, as well as an indirect, influence upon the 
diversifying of agriculture itself. 

The practical difficulties encountered in the adjustnient 
of tariff schedules were, indeed, so great as to cast a serious 
doubt over the wisdom of the protective policy. It is 
always difficult for statesmanship in matters so technical 



PROBLEMS OF TARIFF AND OF MONEY 199 

and complicated to supply itself with the requisite infor- 
mation. And a great variety of private interests are 
tempted to support paid lobbies and to use so-called ''log- 
rolling" methods for their own immediate ends, regardless 
of the general bearings of the policy at large. 

American business men not directly affected by a particu- 
lar schedule have, as a rule, deplored periods of tariff agita- 
tion, because of the uncertainties involved. They wish to 
make their plans with a knowledge of the larger conditions 
affecting industry and trade. The intensity of the tariff 
issue has been lessened to a marked degree in recent years 
for a number of reasons. One reason is the relative matur- 
ing of the newer sections of the country. There was a 
period when the almost exclusively agricultural character 
of the Northwestern states — coinciding with a large 
European demand for American breadstuffs and provisions, 
created a strong Western sentiment in favor of free trade. 
This sentiment, which was universal among Western 
Democrats, was also strong among their Republican fellow- 
citizens at the very time when, as in the Blaine-Cleveland 
campaign of 1884, the tariff question was the most con- 
spicuous issue dividing the national parties. For a con- 
siderable period, the Republicans of Iowa and Minnesota 
were in the anomalous position of having free-trade planks 
in their state platforms in years of presidential and con- 
gressional campaigning, when the country at large was 
fighting out the battle chiefly upon tariff issues. 

But this period passed away with the rapid westward 
development of manufacturing, the immense increase in 
the value of Western lands, and a perception of the fact 
that, for a long time to come, the domestic trade of the 
United States would almost wholly absorb the energies of 



200 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

our producers and distributers. Thus the Republican 
party came to something like unanimity upon the general 
principle of protection. In due time, the Democratic party, 
which had long been faithful to the ideals of free trade, 
began for some reason, at first scarcely defined, to grow 
lukewarm. And it was evident that the tariff was falling 
from its place as a first-class political issue to a place in the 
second rank, and that the tendency was to make it a busi- 
ness man's question rather than a vital part of the stock 
in trade of the professional party pohtician. 

The chief reason for this change is to be found in the 
growth of Southern manufactures. When the South shipped 
all its cotton to Europe and to New England, it was for 
free trade. But now it may be said, on a rough division, 
that the South manufactures one-third of its own raw 
cotton, sends one-third North, and ships the other third 
to Europe. Moreover, the proportion kept for spinning 
and weaving in the South grows constantly larger. With 
its great deposits of coal and iron ore, and its abun- 
dant water-power in the streams falling swiftly from the 
Appalachian uplands, the South is changing its industrial 
character just as Germany in recent years has changed 
hers. 

In short, the old strain of the tariff question in our 
politics was largely due to the strictly agricultural character 
of the South and West. It is not many years since the 
opposing views about the tariff were proclaimed through- 
out the land by bodies of propagandists whose fanaticism 
has scarcely been equaled in all our annals whether political 
or religious. Our political life and its problems, as I have 
had to say so many times in this brief survey, can never 
be understood apart from a sympathetic appreciation of the 



PROBLEMS OF TARIFF AND OF MONEY 201 

temperament of the American people. Ours has always 
been a population capable of intense conviction on the 
intellectual side, and of great heights of enthusiasm and 
devotion on the moral side. 

This must be remembered in its relation to the anti- 
slavery movement of the North, while it must also be 
borne in mind as belonging only in lesser degree to the 
pro-slavery and states' rights movement in the South. It 
explains the great wave of agitation for the prohibition of 
the liquor traffic that swept across the country. It mani- 
fested itself even in the agitation of a question of mere 
business expediency, such as the adoption of a revised 
monetary standard. For there was a time, not so long ago, 
when the "friends of silver," as they called themselves, 
seemed possessed by a sort of religious frenzy ; while some 
of the opposing advocates of a single metallic standard 
really worshiped their golden calf with a solemn reverence 
that indicated a satisfaction of soul as well as of mind. 

This capacity for absorption, and for temporary delusion, 
has its inconveniences; but it goes with that earnestness 
and passion for right solutions, because they are right, that 
are part of the essential life and vigor of our democracy. 
In due time the delusions pass away; the exaggeration of 
controversy diminishes; and practical common sense finds 
useful working solutions. 

It has been part of the constructive mission of American 
politics to provide favorable conditions for the develop- 
ment of the national resources. Every great nation or 
empire in the present period is making use of a varied but 
systematized poHcy for the economic progress of its own 
population and domain, as a distinct sphere or commercial 
entity. Each government has its own reasons which it 



202 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OP AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

must justify at the bar of national opinion. It is not un- 
reasonable to look forward to a time when the nations will, 
by degrees, come to see the desirability of according some- 
thing like the same freedom to the currents of international 
trade that is now recognized as necessary within national 
boundaries. But the doctrinaire aspects of the old con- 
troversy between protection and free trade have almost 
entirely passed away. 

With us in the United States the question will take the 
form of a series of practical issues, with each of which 
statesmen and men of business affairs must deal as best 
they can. Our annexation of Porto Rico and the Hawaiian 
Islands has, at length, by general consent justified their 
inclusion in our economic zone. Our relations to Cuba 
have been followed by mutual tariff concessions, which are 
likely to be increased and to bring Cuba within the area of 
our domestic commerce, — although for her own revenue 
purposes, Cuba at present seems to require a moderate 
tariff upon imports from the United States. The tendency 
of all countries having colonial possessions is to hold their 
outlying territories for mutual trade benefits. It is not the 
desire of the American people to make commercial exploita- 
tion of the Philippines; but it is commonly desired to 
promote Philippine prosperity by giving those islands a 
preferential access to American markets for their sugar, 
tobacco, and other chief products. 

Our best and most constant outside customer is the 
Dominion of Canada. At an earlier period in our history, 
we traded with her under the terms of a mutually bene- 
ficial reciprocity treaty. It was a narrow and imwise 
course, on our part, to discontinue that policy. The Demo- 
cratic party, instead of working for ideal and universal free 



PROBLEMS OF TARIFF AND OF MONEY 203 

trade, would have been wiser to have advocated approxi- 
mate free trade with our nearest neighbors as a beginning. 
But, as I have shown. Democratic idealism on the tariff 
question grew out of the earlier conditions of the cotton 
market, and simply meant free trade with England, when 
expressed in business terms. Canada has now entered upon 
a period of constructive economic development on her own 
behalf, under the stimulus of high protective tariffs, and is 
far less inclined than formerly toward an arrangement 
which would admit American manufactured goods at re- 
duced rates in retm'n for our admission of Canadian coal, 
fish, lumber and forest products, and various farm crops 
and raw materials. 

The McKinley tariff of 1890 contemplated a great exten- 
sion of the reciprocity system, especially with South 
America. The Wilson tariff (Democratic) of 1894, while 
still a high protective system, made an average reduction 
of rates, rejected the reciprocity theory, and put stress 
upon the theory of free raw materials. The Dingley 
(Republican) tariff of 1897 was upon the plan of a con- 
sistent and complete high tariff on raw materials as well 
as finished product. The decade that has followed the 
adoption of that tariff has witnessed great changes in do- 
mestic and foreign business conditions, and it might well 
be assumed that the schedules then adopted would apply 
very imperfectly to the present situation. 

We have, indeed, made great changes in the other parts of 
the national revenue system which was developed to meet 
the needs of increasing expenditure growing out of the war 
with Spain, But the business of the country has somehow 
adapted itself to the Dingley tariff law, and even yet seems 
to prefer that law with its many and obvious imperfections 



204 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

to a period of tariff agitation with entire uncertainty as to 
the nature or extent of changes to be adopted. There is 
no indication that the Sixtieth Congress will seriously 
attempt to make any changes in the present tariff system. 
It is a somewhat curious and significant fact that Eastern 
Republicans, with Massachusetts as the center of their 
expression, and Western Republicans, in Iowa especially, 
seem to be more urgent in their demand for tariff reform 
than any group or section of the Democrats. 

In 1896 the Democrats themselves diverted the national 
issue from the tariff to the money question. In 1900 they 
made it imperialism, apropos of our acquisition of the 
Philippines, with a continuation of the money issue. In 
1904, with the radical Democrats writing the platform and 
the conservatives naming the presidential ticket, all other 
issues of the campaign fell into obscurity before the one 
great question whether or not the country would sustain 
President Roosevelt and keep him at the helm for another 
four years. The result was the greatest personal triumph 
in the history of American politics. Meanwhile, business 
prosperity has continued at high tide, domestic commerce 
has constituted 95 per cent of our total trade, other issues 
have had immediate prominence, and the tariff question 
has been from time to time postponed. 

Quite apart from the far greater changes of tariff policy 
that must come in the future, it is evident that an expert 
commission could propose many changes of detail in the 
present tariff schedules that would be wise and beneficial 
if made on due notice and without agitation. The plan of 
a double tariff consisting of maximum and minimum rates 
has been adopted by several leading European countries, 
with a view to securing concessions from foreign govern- 



PROBLEMS OP TARIFF AND OF MONEY 205 

ments. Such a plan is now advocated by many Ameri- 
cans. 

It is probable that the Republicans in the campaign of 
1908 will promise an immediate revision of the tariff, if 
continued in power. Mr. Bryan's railroad program and 
his proposed solution of the problem of the trusts and com- 
binations, may force the fighting in so aggressive a way 
upon those issues as to keep the tariff in the background. 
Meanwhile, economic policies essentially protective in their 
spirit and purpose are characterizing the work of almost 
every modern government ; and it is reasonable to believe 
that future changes in our own economic policy will come 
by way of modification to meet altering conditions, and 
not by way of sharp reversal. The Democrats had prom- 
ised a radical change of tariff policy when they won their 
victory after the enactment of the McKinley tariff of 1890. 
But, although they were in full power in both houses of 
Congress, — with President Cleveland straining every nerve 
to promote the radical tariff reform which he believed to 
be needful, — it was found that the established business 
poHcy of the country could not be revolutionized. The 
resisting forces were too great to be overcome. 

If once again the Democrats should come into full power, 
perchance in the election of 1908, it is not likely that they 
would even attempt a reversal of the protective policy, al- 
though they would undoubtedly make a sweeping revision 
of the present Dingley tariff. In their attacks upon the 
trusts and monopolies, it has been a favorite contention of 
Mr, Bryan and many other Democratic leaders that the 
tariff has greatly fostered industrial monopoly. It is evi- 
dent that there are some industries which had taken root 
and grown in this country by reason of tariff protection, 



206 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

and which have since combined to suppress domestic com- 
petition and maintain artificial prices under the sheltering 
wall of the tariff which keeps out the foreign competitor. 
How numerous such instances are is a proper subject of 
inquiry ; and the results of inquiry might point to desirable 
reductions of the tariff. 

But with Europe nationalistic and protective, with Japan 
growingly active in policies for the promotion of economic 
progress, with Canada in a similar mood by general agree- 
ment of statesmen and leaders of both parties, and with 
the three chief South American republics entering upon 
a new period of economic development under government 
auspices, it is not likely that the United States will soon 
abandon a system designed to promote production and 
trade on the national rather than the international basis. 

There have been many attempts to explain the disap- 
pearance of what before the war was our vast ocean carry- 
ing trade. Our coastwise trade developed, like our railroads, 
as a part of our national transportation system, foreigners 
being excluded from it by law. The exigencies of the Civil 
War period drove us temporarily from the sea. After the 
war, the far greater rewards that American capital and 
labor could readily obtain in the internal development of 
the country afford an ample explanation of our failure to 
return at once to our abandoned business of ocean freight- 
ing. The maritime peoples of Europe, with fewer oppor- 
tunities on land, were driven to the high seas, and were 
prepared to carry cotton and wheat to Europe for us at 
prices which saved us money on every bale and bushel, thus 
enabling us to devote our capital and energy to the more 
profitable tasks of growing the cotton and wheat, and 
developing our varied resources. 



PROBLEMS OF TARIFF AND OF MONEY 207 

Our ability to hire others to carry on our ocean freighting 
has been a source of great and positive gain to us from the 
business standpoint. Thus far, it has been advantageous 
to us to participate in the triangular movement of trade 
jvhich takes our surplus cotton and food to Europe, takes 
European manufactures to South America, and brings 
coffee, sugar, hides, and other products of South America 
and the West Indies to this country. But we shall, in due 
time, consume most of our own food supply, and shall 
steadily increase the surplus of our manufactured goods. 
It will then be desirable for us to trade directly with South 
America, and there would be advantages in carrying on 
such trade by means of ships of American register. 

The completion of the Panama Canal wiU probably mark 
the beginning of a new era in our foreign commerce, and 
it may possibly be found desirable to promote a revival 
of American merchant shipping by some form of government 
aid. Quite apart from questions of business profit, there 
are reasons of national influence and dignity that might 
prompt us to a policy of mail subventions or other form 
of encouragement in order to secure frequent sailings under 
the American flag to both coasts of South America and to 
the ports of the Far East. 

The economic policy of the government is not to be 
understood when detached from a study of the people 
themselves in their energy and business character, and in 
further relation to their conditions of soil and climate, 
agricultural opportunities, mineral resources, natural and 
artificial lines of transportation, and other conditions of 
environment. When government adopts an economic 
policy that is in keeping with natural tendencies, — a 
policy that neither creates nor thwarts, but that stimulates 



208 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

and assists, — it would seem to have served fully its normal 
functions. 

The expense of government is very great, and since it 
absorbs in the form of revenue so much from the current 
wealth produced by the joint effort of the factors in eco- 
nomic life, it must render in return as large a service as 
may be possible. When government collects money which 
it expends efficiently in the carrying on of schools, it is 
rendering a far-reaching benefit to society in its economic 
as well as its other aspects. What it expends for main- 
taining order and giving security to life, health, and prop- 
erty, is amply justified if means are well adapted to 
ends. 

The cost of its larger defensive forces, — its army, and 
its navy, — while a heavy drain upon the economic re- 
sources of modern peoples, can only be condemned as facts 
and conditions may affect a given case. If preparation for 
war insures peace, an economic age is willing to pay a high 
price for such insurance. A self-sustaining service like 
the post-office may be so conducted in some of its branches 
as to stimulate very greatly the exchanges of the economic 
world, and to promote the diffusion of intelligence. A 
great expenditure for the improvement of rivers and har- 
bors may be more profitable to commerce than burden- 
some in its tax upon resources. A vast outlay for pensions, 
such as our own government makes, at least involves no 
waste of social wealth, but somewhat equalizes conditions 
by returning to a large class of people (who are more or less 
dependent) what it took from the sum total of the people's 
income. 

It is in the method of raising the money to supply its 
needs, almost as much as in the method of expending the 



PROBLEMS OF TARIFF AND OF MONEY 209 

money, that governments may influence economic and social 
conditions. Thus the protective tariff after all is, in its 
origin, an incident of what at the outset was the only 
practicable means of obtaining a national revenue. The 
great public income derived from the internal tax upon 
spirituous liquors, has generally been levied with some 
intentional reference to the social effect of placing burdens 
upon the use of articles which are regarded either as harm- 
ful or as mere indulgences. The resort to the principle 
of the income tax is advocated either with a view to giving 
the government an additional source of certain and direct 
income, or else with the motive of securing a better distri- 
bution of the burden of taxation. A similar remark would 
be appHcable to the proposal to levy taxes, progressive or 
otherwise, upon estates in process of transmission from their 
original owners to their heirs. A tobacco tax obviously 
bears chiefly upon the working classes. A progressive 
income tax or an inheritance tax would tend in its measure 
to lessen the inequalities of private fortunes. 

As I have said, without apology for constant reiteration, 
the imderlying purpose of the American government has 
been to create and maintain democratic institutions, based 
upon a high degree of average intelligence, capacity, and 
well-being. And it is, undoubtedly, quite as permissible an 
exercise of government policy to levy other kinds of taxes 
in such a way as to aid in the equalizing process, as to pro- 
vide tariff discriminations for the benefit of American in- 
dustrial development. Some questions of this kind, if just 
now below the horizon of practical politics, are hkely to 
come into view in the near future. 

I have more than once referred to the place in American 
political life that has been occupied by questions relating 



210 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

to money and banking. The Constitution conferred upon 
Congress the power to coin money and regulate its value. 
The exigencies of the Revolutionary period had led to the 
issue of great quantities of government paper, the so-called 
"Continental notes/' which had depreciated in value 
through the inabihty of the Continental government to 
redeem them. Such paper issued by a government is 
nothing else than a forced loan, the evidences of which are 
in small denominations, convenient for circulation from 
hand to hand ; and it serves the purpose of money. Such 
promises to pay will be accepted with greater or less 
discount, according to the prevaihng opinion respecting 
the prospect of their future redemption at par. 

It is obvious that a widely fluctuating medium of ex- 
change — based ostensibly upon some standard of value 
which has disappeared from actual use — is harmful in 
the extreme to the ordinary course of business, and almost 
prohibitive of intelhgent contracts in which time is an ele- 
ment. It was a great triumph on the part of Mr. Hamilton 
and the early financiers of the Republic to have succeeded 
in helping the business community to reestablish its ex- 
changes upon a basis of gold and silver coin. 

In the speculative period of the westward movement 
and the economic development of the Mississippi Valley 
after 1830, the actual currency of the country was chiefly 
suppUed by issues of bank-notes under state laws. The 
earlier political controversies growing out of the estabhsh- 
ment of a national bank as a fiscal agency for the central 
government — with the abohtion of such a bank, and the 
establishment of the treasury and sub-treasury system — 
were related more closely to the government system of 
collecting and disbursing its income than to the country's 



PROBLEMS OF TARIFF AND OF MONEY 211 

money supply. If all the states had carefully and soundly 
regulated the note issues of their banks, as a few of them 
did, the system could have been tolerated, although it 
would not have been a wise one. But in many states, local 
bank issues were without proper control and regulation, 
bank failures were frequent, and the business of the 
country was most vexatiously interfered with by the lack 
of a safe, standard currency. 

Yet such were the sectional prejudices and antagonisms 
of that period that it was poHtically impossible to give the 
country a well-protected and uniform system of currency. 
It remained for the outbreak of the war between the states 
to force a nationaUzing of the currency system. The 
government was obhged to market war loans, and it 
desired the aid of local bankers. The panic of 1857 had 
brought great numbers of state bank failures, and had 
finally discredited what came to be caUed the "wild-cat" 
currency, issued under state authority. 

The national banking law of 1863 accomplished several 
great purposes at one stroke. It rid the country of the 
state bank-notes by le^^ng a 10 per cent tax upon them, 
thus driving that form of currency out of existence. It pro- 
vided for the incorporation of national banks, with the 
power to issue notes guaranteed by the national govern- 
ment and having, therefore, a imiform character and value 
throughout the country. For its own protection it required 
the banks desiring to issue notes to purchase United States 
government bonds and deposit them at Washington, the 
banks being allowed to issue notes approximately equal to 
the face value of the bonds. This plan helped to secure a 
market for the bonds. Meanwhile, the banks drew the 
interest upon the bonds, and the government levied a 



212 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

moderate tax upon their note issues for purposes of a re- 
demption fund in case of the failure of any particular bank. 
Great numbers of the state banks then existing took out 
United States charters, came under the general regulation 
of the national banking act, and became parts of a sys- 
tem which has continued to this day with much to com- 
mend it. 

It was a vast relief to the country to have the note- 
issuing function transferred to the supervision and control 
of the national government. Unfortunately, the states- 
men of the Civil War period, in their financial exigency, 
did not see how to keep the country's business upon its 
established standards of the gold and silver dollar. Taxes 
were increased in all sorts of ways, and bonds were sold as 
rapidly as possible; but the demands of war expenditure 
remained unsatisfied and the policy of issuing non-interest- 
bearing government notes for purposes of circulation — 
the so-called "paper money" or "Greenbacks" of the war 
period — was entered upon as a practical method of ob- 
taining necessary war supplies. 

As I have already said, the value for practical pur- 
poses of such government notes depends upon the pre- 
vailing confidence of the business community in the prac- 
tical ability of the government to protect and redeem its 
issues at their face value. The government made its green- 
backs receivable for taxes and declared them a legal tender 
for the payment of ordinary debts. Naturally, the circula- 
tion of government paper not limited in quantity and with 
no date fixed for redemption, put a premium upon gold 
and silver and forced them out of circulation. At the more 
dubious period of the Civil War, the depreciation of paper 
money was very serious. The price of gold in terms of 



PROBLEMS OF TARIFF AND OF MONEY 213 

paper averaged 220 throughout 1864, and on one day- 
reached 285. 

After the war there came a period of financial readjust- 
ment and a tremendous poHtical struggle over the proper 
place of the greenbacks in our currency system both in 
theory and in practice. The Greenback party arose as a 
separate movement, while both of the older parties con- 
tained many conspicuous men who sympathized with the 
greenback doctrines. The Greenbackers believed that in- 
terest and principal of the national debt should be paid 
in irredeemable government notes, and that such notes 
should be substituted for the issues of the national 
banks. 

It was held that the government bonds had been sold 
at great discount under conditions of an inflated currency, 
and that to pay them off in gold would be an injustice to 
the producers and workers of the country, and a discrimi- 
nation in favor of the people then popularly known as 
"bloated bondholders." The conservative elements, on 
the other hand, held firmly to the literal contract which 
made the bonds redeemable in coin, and to the world- 
established doctrines regarding the nature and character 
of money. The struggle was a sincere one on both sides. 
The West and South, with undeveloped resources, and 
representing the debtor rather than the creditor class, 
naturally feared the effect of what might be in the nature 
of contracting the currency and increasing the purchasing 
power of the dollar. 

In the Sherman Resumption Act of 1875, which went into 
effect at the beginning of 1879, the conservative position 
prevailed, and it will be the verdict of history, beyond a 
doubt, that this act was one of sound policy and broad 



214 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

statesmanship. The government notes remained in circu- 
lation, but their quantity was fixed; and the mere fact 
that the government could and would redeem them upon de- 
mand gave them the same position for ordinary use as the 
bank-notes, so that all parts of the sum total of our circu- 
lation, whether gold and silver coin, bank-notes, or green- 
backs, circulated interchangeably and without prejudice. 

But with the acceptance by the country of the metallic 
basis of its money system, there arose another controversy 
which, in the end, assumed deeper intensity and larger 
political proportions than had ever belonged to the paper 
money struggle. Before the war, both gold and silver had 
been monetary standards. The law had fixed the ratio 
of weight between them at 16 to 1. Before the great dis- 
coveries of gold in California and Australia, silver had been 
relatively more plentiful, and since the ratio did not fit 
exact bullion conditions, the real monetary basis was the 
silver dollar. After the sudden expansion of gold output, 
however, the bullion situation had changed, and at the 
existing mint ratio the gold dollar was a little cheaper, 
and it, in turn, became the actual standard. 

In 1873 Congress, without much consideration of the 
question, had passed a law practically abolishing silver as 
an alternative standard. The bullion ratio in the open mar- 
ket was such, at that time, as to give the question a seem- 
ingly slight importance. But after the full resumption of 
specie payments, — with the practical policy fairly en- 
tered upon of paying the interest and principal of the 
public debt in gold, — bullion conditions rapidly changed. 
Not only were great deposits of silver found, but new 
methods and processes for the extraction of silver enor- 
mously increased and cheapened the supply. 



PROBLEMS OF TARIFF AND OF MONEY 215 

The mints had, in former periods, been open to all comers 
who had silver bullion to exchange for silver dollars of a 
legal weight and fineness. All that was required was the 
payment of a small seigniorage for the expense of assaying 
and coining. Such dollars had been money of absolute 
authority for the payment of all public and private obliga- 
tions. But with a large output of new silver, the mints 
were found closed, the perfunctory enactment of 1873 was 
popularly discovered, and a vast contention began in which 
sincere public conviction as well as powerful private inter- 
est was enlisted upon each side. 

It was a contest that was waged through twenty years 
with ever growing intensity. Various conditions were coin- 
ciding after the panic of 1873, in a long period of depression, 
to influence the motives and the point of view of men in 
the farming regions. The railroad building and the land 
speculation following the war had been overdone. Hard 
times had set in after one of the sharpest financial panics 
in our history. Almost the entire country west of Penn- 
sylvania had been carried away by enticing monetary 
doctrines, and Congress had voted in 1874 to inflate the 
greenback issues to a fixed amount of $400,000,000. The 
country had been saved from this mistake only by the veto 
of President Grant, who adhered to a financial policy that 
had been initiated by a great authority at the head of the 
Treasury Department, Mr. McCulloch. 

In 1866, just after the war, Congress had approved the 
Secretary's policy of a steady retirement of greenback notes 
and contraction of the currency. The fresh confidence 
thus given to the credit of the government would in any 
case have increased the purchasing power of the green- 
backs, and this would have expressed itself in a general fall 



216 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

of prices. But a fall of prices always seems a hardship to 
farmers and producers; and there was a demand for a 
check in the policy of contraction. In 1868 Congress 
stopped the Treasury practice by fixing the volume of notes 
at $356,000,000, that being the amount then in circula- 
tion. 

After the panic, as I have said, and in the period of reac- 
tion, the demand for inflated paper issues, for the sake of 
increasing prices and making it easier to pay debts, swept 
the Mississippi Valley with irresistible strength, and it was 
reflected in the measure of 1874, vetoed by the President. 
When Greenbackism, after that, attempted to carry its 
views as a separate party organization, it was weaker than 
when it had pervaded both institutional parties as a social 
and economic doctrine. It is highly creditable to the 
country that in the face of such a sentiment, under the pall 
of deep business depression, the Resumption Act of 1875 
was carried through Congress. 

This act made very slight contraction of the currency, 
fixing the volume of greenbacks at $346,000,000; but it 
provided that they should be kept at par with gold by being 
made redeemable, — although they were not to be canceled 
when redeemed, but paid out again by the government as 
a part of the country's volume of currency. 

The redemption feature was not, however, to go into 
effect until 1879. Meanwhile, the silver movement had 
its origin chiefly at the instance of the Western mine owners. 
In 1876 the price of silver had so declined that the bullion 
value of the silver dollar of 412.8 grains was about 89| 
cents in terms of gold. The discount on greenbacks at 
that time had made them worth about 87|- cents. Notes 
were growing better because of the improving credit of the 



PROBLEMS OF TARIFF AND OF MONEY 217 

government; but silver was growing worse because of 
certain world-wide conditions affecting its production and 
use. 

In 1876 the House Committee on Mines and Mining at- 
tempted to secure the passage of a bill which would have 
opened the mints to the coinage of silver dollars for the full 
benefit of any one depositing the bullion, such dollars to 
be full legal tender for all public and private purposes. 
The bill was not passed, but a great debate was entered 
upon. It resulted in the compromise known as the Bland- 
Allison Act of 1878. This is to be remembered as one of 
the landmarks in our economic history. The silver dollar, 
let it be borne in mind, had wholly disappeared ten years 
before the war; so that when men spoke of hard money 
and payment in coin, they meant gold. Legally, however, 
the silver dollar had existed until it had been dropped from 
the list of American coins by the Act of 1873. If we had 
merely repealed the Act of 1873, having resumed specie 
payment in 1875, we should have found ourselves in effect, 
like Mexico, upon a silver basis. 

In other words, at the weight ratio of 16 to 1, the silver 
dollar in the later seventies was ten cents cheaper than the 
gold dollar, and would have been used for the payment of 
debts, so that gold would have disappeared from circulation. 
It was the belief of the silver mining men and of the theoreti- 
cal bimetallists that the free opening of the mints to silver 
would so affect the market price for both precious metals 
as to restore approximately the buUion ratio of 16 to 1. 
France and her fellow-members of the so-called Latin 
Monetary Union had, meanwhile, suspended the coinage 
of silver. Our country, for years, was engaged in ne- 
gotiations with European governments on the basis of the 



218 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

theory that silver and gold could be kept at a parity by 
an international agreement, fixing the ratio and providing 
for the opening of mints and the giving of full validity 
to both metals for monetary purposes. 

But, meanwhile, our compromise measure of 1878 made 
the government a purchaser of not less than $2,000,000 
worth of silver every month, to be coined into dollars and 
put into circulation. This was really token money, because 
the government coined on its own account, issued the silver 
dollars — or notes representing them — at par with gold, 
and maintained free interchange on the gold basis of all 
parts of our monetary system. But government purchase 
did not restore old-time ratios. The price of silver kept a 
downward course; Europe would not join in a bimetallic 
movement; the market ratio between gold and silver fell 
to 25 to 1, and later, for a time, to about 32 to 1. In other 
words, the actual amount of silver in a standard dollar 
came to be worth for a time only fifty cents. 

After a period of years, the government's monthly pur- 
chases of silver increased under modifications of the law to 
4,500,000 ounces per month, the government issuing silver 
certificates and depositing the bullion without attempting 
to coin it. The psychological effect upon the people in 
the West and South where silver dollars circulated freely 
was one that, under the given conditions, could hardly have 
been different. They became accustomed to actual con- 
tact with the silver dollar, and it seemed to them a sufficient 
monetary standard. They had crops to sell and interest 
to pay on mortgages. Cheap money and high prices seemed 
to them eminently desirable. They familiarized themselves 
with the idea that the Act of 1873 was a crime, and that the 
gold standard was a device of the Eastern and European 



PROBLEMS OF TARIFF AND OF MONEY 219 

capitalists and money-lenders for the oppression of the 
producing and debtor classes. 

Meanwhile, the volume of outstanding silver dollars and 
silver notes based upon bullion purchases became enormous. 
And the Treasury was finding a growing difficulty in hold- 
ing enough gold reserve to preserve the faith of the country 
in its ability to keep the different parts of our money system 
interchangeable on the basis of the intrinsic value of the 
gold dollar. The laws were in such condition that the 
silver notes could be pushed into circulation by bankers 
and others, who hoarded greenbacks, and could use them 
(the volume of greenbacks being kept at $346,000,000) by 
a so-called "endless chain" plan to draw the government's 
gold reserve out of the Treasury. There seemed to be 
actual danger lest, in spite of ourselves, we should be 
thrown upon the silver basis. 

Mr. Cleveland, in his second term, foimd himself con- 
fronted with this imminent danger. Every possible Treas- 
ury device was resorted to by the administration to keep a 
reserve stock of gold and maintain full monetary credit. 
Government bonds were issued not so much to meet exigen- 
cies due to public expenditure as to obtain fresh stocks of 
gold. At length, a special session of Congress was impelled 
in 1893 to suspend the monthly purchases of silver bullion. 

This purchase device had been unsatisfactory to both 
sides in the great contention. It afforded a large market 
to silver miners ; but what they wanted was the full resto- 
ration of silver as standard money, and the farmers of the 
South and West, from 1893 to 1896, were stirred up by 
an organized propaganda which was carried into every 
school district. Public men of both great parties were 
divided. The issue culminated in the election of 1896. 



220 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

The silver men carried the Democratic national convention 
and made Mr. Bryan their standard-bearer. The Repub- 
licans were forced by the logic of the situation to what, for 
practical purposes, was a support of the gold standard, 
although they still held out some hope of a possible inter- 
national arrangement. Mr. McKinley, the Republican 
nominee, had been friendly to the use of silver money and 
had hoped for the ultimate success of the bimetalHc system. 

From having been a less emotional and popular contro- 
versy in the earlier period, the silver question had, after 
1890, aroused intense feeling and conviction. In states Hke 
Colorado it swept the whole community before it, so that in 
its sectional aspects it was more sharply defined, if possible, 
than the slavery contest had been in the fifties. In so far 
as it was due to selfish motives, it was a movement of the 
silver mining interests that were successful in stirring up the 
agricultural regions at a time when farms were mortgaged, 
prices were low, drought had devastated extensive regions, 
foreclosures and evictions were common, and the gold 
standard seemed in some subtle, unceasing way to be 
making it harder and harder for the farmer to obtain 
dollars with which to meet deferred payments. 

After the so-called sound money victory of 1896, it was 
inevitable that the question should have recurred in 1900. 
But many things had happened to lessen its intensity. A 
great wave of prosperity had set in, and the war with Spain 
had given rise to new questions. With amazing rapidity, 
the world's production of gold had increased, and even the 
mining interests of the West showed quick recovery from 
the shock of defeat. Colorado consoled herself for a declin- 
ing silver interest by a remarkable revival and expansion 
of her gold output. 



PROBLEMS OF TARIFF AND OF MONEY 221 

The great money fight, hke many another contest among 
earnest bodies of men, seems not discreditable to either 
side in the contest if studied fairly, even when, as in this 
case, the perspectives of history are still very short ones. 
One must study the statistics of farm values, the facts of 
railroad building, and all other phases of that unprecedented 
movement which has built up our Western states before he 
can pronounce judgment upon the motives and convictions 
that entered into our monetary contest. 

Where contracts for the payment of money at deferred 
periods are sharply sectionalized, it is extremely difficult 
to make it appear to the opposing private interests that 
the money terms written in such contracts have the same 
intrinsic character at the end of the period that they had 
at the beginning. We have now been fortunate in having 
a long series of years of remarkable prosperity, during which 
the farms of the West have paid off their mortgages, and 
in which capital has become widely diffused. Conditions 
now existing make it easy for the government to main- 
tain the parity on a gold basis of all parts of the monetary 
system. The great leaders of the battle against a gold 
standard, while professing to retain their theoretical views, 
admit that the enormous recent production of gold — to- 
gether with the total change in the sectional relation- 
ships of debtor and creditor classes — have removed the 
money issue from the realm of immediate practical politics. 

Yet the monetary system of the country is one that could 
be improved and strengthened in many respects, and there 
are questions of currency reform that ought to be dealt 
with in a scientific spirit at a moment when they are not 
involved in partisan or popular controversy, and have 
little if any sectional bearing. It is no part of my purpose 



222 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

to discuss currency reform in a technical sense. I am 
merely showing how the money question has entered into 
political controversy in this country, and how it has inevi- 
tably been associated with all the conditions of rapid na- 
tional expansion. It is the present judgment of the great 
business forces of the world that gold answers better than 
anything else for the purposes of a standard upon which to 
base public and private contracts for the repayment of 
borrowed capital, and as a commodity in which to redeem 
all forms of circulating currency. No single commodity, 
such as gold, could form a theoretically perfect standard. 

Thus far, however, the money function of government 
throughout the civilized world has been confined in the 
main to a recognition of the determinations of the com- 
mercial world, and to the protection of the standard modes 
by which the business community agrees to carry on its 
transactions. It is one of the chief functions of modern 
government to recognize, record, and enforce private con- 
tracts. Government aids the business world by legalizing 
and inspecting weights and measures. Money, as the meas- 
ure of value, is of such vital importance to the business 
world, that government from the earliest times has coined it 
and protected it. It has been our fate more than that of 
most other countries to have brought the problems of 
money into sharp, intense political controversy. It is now 
plainly the duty of government so to adjust the monetary 
system as to diminish, so far as possible, the range of future 
political controversy in that particular field. 

As I have shown with regard to other questions, the 
economic world goes very far toward the establishment of 
its own laws and principles. The function of government 
is to keep those laws and principles in operation for the 



PROBLEMS OF TARIFF AND OF MONEY 223 

general benefit ; to protect sections and individuals against 
injustice, and to maintain conditions of safety and harmony. 

The business of banking, quite apart from the issue of 
currency, is one that government very properly regulates 
for the protection of the community at large. For similar 
reasons the business of insurance is one that requires, in a 
peculiar sense, the oversight and regulation of government. 
It is easily conceivable that both banking and insurance 
are functions that might with comparative ease be trans- 
ferred to government for direct management. In certain 
countries, as in Germany, there is a marked tendency 
toward the assumption by government of various forms of 
banking and insurance as a means chiefly of promoting the 
social and economic weU-being of the poorer classes. It is 
not imlikely that government savings banks and forms of 
working-men's insurance may, in the near future, come to be 
strongly urged in all civilized countries as enterprises that 
government ought to undertake. 

With us in the United States, the chief thing is to en- 
com'age men in the exercise of their own energies through 
protection of their opportunities. The state will not com- 
pel the working-man to save his money, but it can and 
should encourage him in saving it by so regulating and con- 
trolling savings banks, industrial and life insurance, and 
other financial and business organizations, as to safeguard 
the working-man's opportunities and to encourage him in 
thrift. Thus far in our experience of nation-making and 
government, political controversy over questions of an 
economic nature has merely brought us to the point of a 
better regulation of economic methods and conditions for 
the protection of the ordinary citizen in the exercise of a 
reasonable freedom of action. 



IX 



PROBLEMS OF FOREIGN POLICY, INTERNATIONAL RELATION- 
SHIP, AND EXTENSION OF SOVEREIGNTY 

However sound may be the theory that a nation should 
never carry its political differences into questions affecting 
its outside relations, it is manifestly impossible to give 
practical effect to any such counsel of prudence. Even 
those who profess to stand by the old maxim that they are 
for their own country, right or wrong, usually insist upon 
their own point of view in a time of- emergency. It is a 
difficult matter for a nation to find a consistent line of pohcy 
in its relationships with the rest of the world, and to keep 
domestic controversies from affecting foreign relations. 

We became a nation at a time when international law, 
in so far as it had been evolved, was merely a body of doc- 
trine and usage that concerned the Christian powers of 
Europe. Wars were frequent and devastating, alliances 
were shifting, reigning dynasties were frequently in closer 
understanding and harmony with one another than with 
the nations over which they ruled, and portents of great 
transition seemed everywhere visible. 

The English retained the provinces and vast territory to 
the north of us, the French and Spaniards held the terri- 
tory to the west and south, including Florida and the 
mouths of the Mississippi River. France had helped us 
in our war, but the events of the French Revolution had 

224 



PROBLEMS OF FOREIGN POLICY AND EXPANSION 225 

aroused much prejudice among sober-minded and con- 
servative Americans, while the philosophical principles of 
French political reform continued to fascinate the followers 
of Mr. Jefferson. The French had expected us to adhere 
to an alliance with them which might be useful in their 
times of need. 

Our foreign relations in that early period played a large 
part in our internal controversies, and Washington's steady 
judgment was of incalculable value. His Farewell Address, 
counseling the nation against foreign alliances, has held 
its place as an authoritative document. If his views had 
prevailed in practical appHcation, it is probable that we 
should have avoided the second war with England, the issues 
of which might just as well have been settled by a patient 
and skilful diplomacy. But that war, like the war with 
Mexico in 1846, and the war between the states in 1861, 
was largely due to the fact that we had failed as yet to 
secure a sufficient harmony in our domestic politics, so 
that the pendulum of controversy swung too far and too 
violently. 

If oiu" experience has taught us anything, it is that one 
of the best safeguards against foreign war is domestic 
peace; while, on the contrary, the harsh and unregulated 
play of political contention within a nation, due to funda- 
mental discords, is a great hindrance to the diplomatist 
who would like to find peaceful solutions for differences 
between nations. 

After the statesmanship and doctrine of the Washington 
period, and the mishap of our second war with England, the 
next great experience in our development of foreign policy 
and doctrine came with the announcement in 1823 of 
what is called the Monroe Doctrine. Our example had 

Q 



226 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

been followed by the Spanish territories of Mexico, Central 
America, and South America, and a series of Spanish- 
American republics had been established with constitu- 
tions modeled upon ours. A reaction had set in among 
the ruling coteries of Europe, and the Holy Alliance had 
been formed to stop the disintegrating trend of liber- 
alism and, incidentally, to aid Spain in the reconquest of 
America. 

The aims of the Holy Alliance were contrary to English 
policy, and our government was encouraged by England in 
its outspoken position. John Quincy Adams was Secretary 
of State, while Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison were, though 
in retirement, still available for consultation about great 
policies. The Monroe Doctrine belonged to no individual, 
but expressed the views of all our foremost statesmen. It 
held that America was no longer to be regarded as a field 
for European colonial adventure. It was, in effect, a declara- 
tion that we would defend the independence of the new 
Latin-American republics, that we were opposed to the 
transfer of remaining American colonies from one European 
sovereign to another, and that we regarded the Western 
Hemisphere as in process of evolving a series of self-govern- 
ing states, which should adopt our ideals of peace and 
democratic equality, and should be free from the militarism 
of Europe and its surviving feudal institutions. 

The second war with England had settled no specific 
questions in controversy, but it had done a great deal to 
nationalize the spirit of the country. It had given us free- 
dom and prestige on the high seas; it had taught Europe 
to respect us and believe in our permanence ; it had ended 
those colonial traditions and prejudices which had given 
us French parties and English parties in our domestic 



PROBLEMS OF FOREIGN POLICY AND EXPANSION 227 

politics; it had destroyed the first secessionist movement, 
namely, that of New England as centered in the Hartford 
convention; it had advertised and popularized our recent 
purchase of the Louisiana country through our military 
victory at New Orleans and our assertion of exclusive con- 
trol over Mississippi navigation; and it had brought for- 
ward a new set of statesmen, — notable among them being 
Jackson, the military hero of New Orleans; Clay and Cal- 
houn; with men like Crawford, Webster, and Benton soon 
to appear as national leaders. 

We had finally purchased Florida from the Spaniards, and 
were engaged in a triangular diplomatic dispute with Russia 
and England over the Oregon country. While we were 
completing the diplomacy for the extension of our domain, 
with an instinct for scientific frontiers and continental 
integrity, these questions were always mixed up in their 
motives with the divisive and sectional character of our 
domestic politics. The Northeast was naturally concerned 
about Maine, the St. Lawrence River, and our fishing rights 
in Canadian waters and off the coasts of Newfoundland. 
To our people pressing westward, the Oregon question seemed 
important. To our new Southwest, relations with Mexico 
and Spain bulked large in political significance. To 
the Carolinas and Florida the future of Cuba and all 
the developments in the West Indies and to the south- 
ward were matters of concern and anxiety. 

Nationalism and sectionalism were growing side by side, 
with strange admixtures of motive and curious results upon 
public pohcy. Compromise statesmanship sought to miti- 
gate sectional feeling, in the hope that time might lessen 
the tendency to division, while increasing national power 
and influence. I have shown in previous pages how the 



228 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

acquisition of Texas for slave territory led to the pur- 
chase of California for freedom. The long contest over the 
Oregon country was settled by a diplomatic compromise 
which was infinitely better than war, however disappoint- 
ing to those Americans who claimed a much larger strip of 
country west of Lake Superior. 

This settlement came at a time when the South was 
friendly to England through reason of its expanding cotton 
trade ; and our own sectional animosities stood in the way 
of our securing in the far Northwest a boundary line which 
could have been asserted with success, in all probability, 
if we had been harmonious among ourselves. As one 
studies the rather inglorious chapters of our political and 
diplomatic history in the period from 1825 to 1860, it seems 
a matter of good fortune and of adventitious circumstance, 
rather than of consistent statesmanship, that — excepting 
for the Mexican episode in the forties — we were not drawn 
into foreign war. 

But all our crucial questions, domestic and foreign alike, 
were accumulating and were gradually shaping themselves 
along the line of our internal sectional cleavage. There 
was no way to settle these things by a foreign war, and so 
we fought them out among ourselves. At the end of the 
Civil War period we were in position to command the re- 
spect of Europe, and to make our views felt in all matters 
that concerned our outside relationships. 

In the first year of our war, England, France, and Spain 
had jointly agreed to intervene in Mexico and change the 
government of that republic on slight pretexts of debts 
neglected and grievances of private citizens imredressed. 
Mr. Seward, as Secretary of State, could protest in a dig- 
nified way in diplomatic correspondence, but we were 



PROBLEMS OF FOREIGN POLICY AND EXPANSION 229 

powerless to do anything else. Meanwhile, England and 
Spain disagreed with France, and Napoleon III pursued 
the adventure alone, making a successful invasion and 
placing Maximilian of Austria in power as dynastic head 
of a new Mexican empire. 

At the close of the war. General Grant sent an army to 
the Rio Grande to support the Mexican patriots, the French 
troops were withdrawn from the country, Maximilian's 
imperialist movement came to a fatal end, and the Mexican 
repubUc was reestabhshed under our auspices and protec- 
tion. We were forgiven at last for having taken Texas 
and California, and Europe discovered more about the 
Monroe Doctrine through a concrete lesson than could 
possibly have been learned through volumes of dissertation 
or diplomatic correspondence. 

England, through our war period, had been in a state 
of divided sentiment. Obviously, our blockade of Southern 
ports and our creation of England's cotton famine had 
brought immense loss and distress upon that country. 
Our commerce, in turn, had suffered from Confederate 
cruisers and privateers in the equipment of which the South 
had made use of private British aid, and we claimed that 
this might have been prevented by greater vigilance on 
the part of the British government. Canada, meanwhile, 
throughout the war, had been sympathetic toward the 
cause of the North. The Southern statesmen felt that 
England had given them encouragement and made them 
promises which were wholly unfulfilled. Thus, at the end 
of the contest in 1865, the North had its deep grievances 
against England, while the South was almost equally bitter. 

That was the moment when statesmanship failed us, 
with the assassination of Mr. Lincoln — the greatest single 



230 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

disaster that ever befell our country. Mr. Lincoln would 
have enlisted the cooperation of General Lee and the best 
minds of the South; would have restored the Southern 
states in a spirit of brotherhood; would have avoided the 
mistake of immediate negro suffrage and its attendant Re- 
construction horrors; would have used Southern rather 
than Northern troops to cause the expulsion of the French 
from Mexico. He would have been prepared to meet the 
questions at issue with England with a united country 
behind him greatly superior at that moment in its military 
and naval strength to any other power in the world. But 
after the death of Lincoln, our statesmanship dragged itself 
through a morass of sectional bitterness and fallacy and 
purely futile coercion, and could not find those moments 
of calm vision necessary to a just forecast of the future. 

The British government was sufficiently apologetic and 
regretful. At that time the Dominion of Canada had not 
been formed. The British provinces in North America were 
separate from each other. All the country west of the 
province of Ontario was merely a hunting and trapping 
wilderness in which the Hudson Bay Company bought 
furs, trafficked with the Indians, and exercised govern- 
ment. Mr. Seward had, indeed, a capacity for large views, 
and at a fortunate moment he improved the opportunity 
to buy Alaska from the Russians. The British govern- 
ment, in token of good-will and to repair all errors of the 
past, offered to give us its great territories of the Northwest, 
which would have added almost as much to our domain 
as the entire extent of the United States. 

In our blindness and fatuity, we preferred a lawsuit to 
collect damages for Confederate inroads upon our com- 
merce, — due, as we claimed, indirectly to British negli- 



PROBLEMS OF FOREIGN POLICY AND EXPANSION 231 

gence in preventing the Confederates from fitting out a 
few commerce-destroyers in British ports. At that time 
the Canadian colonies exercised no jm-isdiction over the 
British Northwestern country, and made no pretense of 
even a moral claim to it. As I have said, with intentional 
repetition, one of the greatest objects of a far-seeing national 
statesmanship, is the acquisition of contiguous, unoccupied 
territory, for purposes of national expansion. Jefferson 
had strained the Constitution to make the Louisiana Pur- 
chase, and had sent the Lewis and Clark Expedition to the 
Columbia River and the Oregon country at a period when 
our movement of settlement had scarcely crossed the AUe- 
ghanies and the Blue Ridge. But sixty years later, after 
we had acquired California, chartered the transcontinental 
railroads, developed Oregon, and were purchasing Alaska, 
our public men declined to accept as a free gift those vast 
and noble regions which now comprise Manitoba, British 
Columbia, the intervening province of Alberta, the great 
wheat-growing country called Saskatchewan, and the min- 
eral wealth of the Yukon. 

Further than that, the British government was prepared 
to settle, in a generous spirit, all the long-standing questions 
about fishing rights and many other matters of detail that 
had survived in the Northeast from the Revolutionary 
period. But not to stop there. Great Britain was quite 
willing to go the final length, and give its consent to our 
annexation of the Maritime Provinces, Upper and Lower 
Canada, and Newfoundland. It was a period of such 
friendly sentiments toward us on the part of the Canadian 
colonies, and of such need on their part of close trade rela- 
tions with us, that annexation would have been welcome 
to them. 



232 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OP AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

War, whatever the excuses for it, is attended by many 
penalties. One of the greatest penalties we have had to 
pay has been in the obscuring of our perceptions as to 
wise and far-reaching policies. In the bitterness of sec- 
tionalism and in the stress of a vicious political life tainted 
by the venality and corruption of the speculative period 
following the Civil War, wisdom was dismissed, and the 
spirit of foresight was wholly lost. A constructive states- 
manship would have helped to put the South on its feet 
and would have acquired the whole of British North America 
in an atmosphere of universal good-will. But nations, as 
individuals, have to learn wisdom through discipline of 
hard experience; and, where a better destiny fails them 
through their inability to rise to their supreme opportu- 
nities, they must do the best they can with the narrower 
chances that will come to them when, at later periods, 
they have recovered somewhat the ability to see clearly 
and act sensibly. 

We made the treaty of Washington with England and 
set up the Geneva arbitration under which we recovered a 
few millions of dollars. We had established arbitration as 
a method of settling differences v/ith England, in conse- 
quence of which we lost and paid an absurd price in a 
later arbitration to settle the claims of Canadian fishermen 
against us, while, years afterward, we lost again in a conten- 
tion regarding the Alaska fur-bearing seals. At a far later 
date we settled the dispute about the Alaska boundary by 
means of a tribunal which we knew in advance would ratify 
our claim to a continuous Alaska coast-line, which we should 
not in any case have surrendered. 

All these contentions which have entered more or less 
into our political life, which have affected our tariff contro- 



PROBLEMS OF FOREIGN POLICY AND EXPANSION 233 

versies, and which have endangered our foreign relations on 
several occasions, would have been settled in a final and 
comprehensive way if we had accepted the whole of British 
North America at the end of our Civil War and had devoted 
ourselves to the harmonious up-building of the North 
American continent. 

There would never have arisen any further question as 
to the extension of our domains. Our ideals of a homo- 
geneous people, using the same language and governing 
themselves in communities based upon British institu- 
tions with the customs and principles of the common law, 
would have been promoted in the largest possible way. 
Our friendliness with Great Britain would have been 
assured, because no questions of dispute would have re- 
mained. 

But our politicians rejected this large opportunity to settle 
all foreign questions and to fix forever our destinies as the 
foremost power of the world. Instead of this, they nagged 
England on all occasions, encouraged Irish Fenianism, and 
ahenated the Canadians, our natural friends, by a harsh 
commercial policy. Our treaty of reciprocity with Canada 
expired in 1866, and we failed to renew it. Whatever had 
been its merits or its faults from the standpoint of com- 
mercial details, there were large social and political ad- 
vantages arising from close relations with Canada. And it 
had been the general opinion that at some moment when 
the British government found sufficient reason for willing- 
ness to withdraw from North America, the Canadian 
provinces would gladly enter our Union as states through 
natural affinity, and through gravitation of a sort even 
stronger than that which had brought Texas and Califor- 
nia into the American fold. 



234 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

But the dominant politics at Washington, after Lincoln's 
death, occupied itself with the attempt to impeach President 
Johnson, to reconstruct the South on a false basis, to develop 
and exploit the West in a spirit subsequently revealed by 
the Credit Mobilier investigations, and to encourage the 
new protectionist movement at the very point where it 
was most to be deprecated. Much, indeed, might be said 
for the broad tariff theories of those who desired to stimu- 
late our major hnes of manufacture — iron and steel prod- 
ucts, textiles, pottery, glass, and the Hke. But to turn 
all the permanent forces of Canada's economic development 
away from normal lines for the sake of excluding a few 
fishermen and farmers from our markets, was to travesty 
the principles of protectionism. 

Our one great opportunity for expansion lay to the 
northward, where, until a few years ago, there was no settle- 
ment or development of any consequence except within a 
narrow zone along our own frontier. One fatuous policy 
after another, upon our part, has now indefinitely postponed 
the possibility of our Northern and Northwestern growth. 
The sons of our Western farmers are flocking by the scores 
of thousands into the Canadian Northwest ; and they will 
help to build up Canadian provinces rather than American 
states. It would have been better for everybody con- 
cerned to have had one great nation occupying our conti- 
nent north of the Mexican line. Until recently it was an 
ideal of easy realization. Each year, as it passes, makes 
that solution more difficult and less probable. The re- 
sources of Canada will be developed chiefly by the capital 
and energy of the citizens of the United States, and we shall 
lose to another power — just as Europe has lost to us — in 
the transfer of money, men, and productive energy. 



PROBLEMS OF FOREIGN POLICY AND EXPANSION 235 

Under the circumstances, there remains for the time being 
only one thing to do ; namely, to settle detailed questions 
of difference with Canada, to promote the best possible 
relations, and to encourage rather than discourage mutual 
trade and intercourse of all kinds, on the sound principle 
that one's nearest neighbors should be one's best and most 
useful friends. But an artificial frontier two or three 
thousand miles long — stretching across a wilderness 
which we ourselves had the energy and means to develop 
with a rapidity unprecedented in the history of the world — 
should never have been allowed to become hardened and 
established as a permanent dividing line between nations 
whose trade policies would thereby have to abandon their 
natural courses. 

The Monroe Doctrine, meanwhile, has had its further 
development until it is no longer to be explained by mere 
reference to the language of 1823 or to the situations that 
then existed. As it has grown, it may be termed an ex- 
pression of the feeling of the people of the United States 
about the conditions and destinies of the Western Hemi- 
sphere as a whole, made influential by concrete tests. It 
does not pledge us to any line of action in a given case, 
and it is not inconsistent with any line of policy we may 
choose to adopt in our relations with other parts of the 
world. 

We have always recognized the fact that Europe would 
trade extensively with all American countries, would have 
some difficulties with them, and some complex relationships. 
We have always been tolerant of the fact that European 
colonies had survived in America from an earlier period. 
But our general attitude has been opposed to reconquests 
or further extensions of European sovereignty, and we have 



236 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

been openly favorable to the establishment of independent 
governments of a republican form throughout the Western 
world. We have endeavored at different times and in a 
variety of ways to promote the settlement of disputes 
between Central and South American powers and European 
governments on such a basis as to avoid European naval 
expeditions and the seizure and occupancy of American 
seaports. South American governments have been so 
turbulent and unstable that it has required great tact and 
effort on our part, at the expense of many misunderstand- 
ings, to help them keep their independence through the 
period necessary for their firm establishment. 

When the rest of Latinic America was breaking away 
from Europe, the islands of Cuba and Porto Rico were held 
by Spain. One revolution had succeeded another in Cuba, 
with much aid and encouragement privately rendered from 
this country. And on several occasions we had come near 
the point of official intervention. For seventy-five years 
Americans had regarded the Spanish yoke as temporary, 
and had expected that Cuba would either become an inde- 
pendent republic or be absorbed by this country. Our 
attitude toward Cuba had been affected not only by the 
geographical nearness of the island, but also by our large 
interest in the sugar and tobacco which were the chief 
export crops of the island. 

The Cuban revolt of 1895 had followed, after a lapse of 
only a few years, a ten-years' struggle for independence. 
It soon reached a form peculiarly disastrous to all interests. 
The revolutionists had no access to the sea, but were safe 
and strong in the highlands and forests of the interior. The 
Spaniards accumulated on the island a force of approxi- 
mately two hundred thousand men. The Spaniards could 



PROBLEMS OF FOREIGN POLICY AND EXPANSION 237 

not prevail against the tactics of an enemy that retreated 
and fought no battles, and the revolutionists could neither 
drive the Spaniards from the fortified places on the sea- 
board, nor prevent the bringing of recruits and supplies by 
water. It was a deadlocked situation which resulted in 
a maximum of suffering and gave no prospect of early 
solution, Spain was exhausting her resources with no 
honorable way of withdrawal, and Cuba was the victim 
of a warfare which was destroying women and children. 

The people of the United States could see no solution 
short of the complete withdrawal of Spain from the Western 
Hemisphere, Spain, on the other hand, could promise 
reforms of administration, but could not give up technical 
sovereignty in the West Indies, because any cabinet or 
dynasty at Madrid consenting to such surrender would 
have been overthrown before the process was. complete. 
Whatever, from the standpoint of international law or 
political doctrine, might have been said by way of c xcuse 
for American intervention, there arose a tide of public 
opinion which swept all things before it. The intention of 
the American people was not to enter upon a quarrel, but 
to end one; not to make war, but to do a piece of police 
work and establish conditions of stable peace where war 
had been more or less chronic for three quarters of a cen- 
tury. In several weeks the task was accomplished. Cuba 
had become a burden to Spain, and compulsory withdrawal 
was a merciful relief to the people of the Iberian Peninsula 
who were paying not only the heavy pecuniary tax of the 
war, but also the heavier tax that made sacrifice of their 
sons in the hopeless attempt to hold East Indian and West 
Indian possessions by military force. 

Many things have resulted from our adventure in 1898 



238 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OP AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

for the liberation of Cuba. We were compelled to reorgan- 
ize our army and to develop our navy. We were drawn 
into various currents of international relationship from 
which we had expected to keep ourselves relatively free. 
An attempt to emancipate Cuba had forced us to offensive- 
defensive action in the Pacific to protect our coasts against 
the Philippine fleet of' the Spaniards. We had destroyed 
that fleet at Manila, had come into temporary occupation 
of the Philippine archipelago, and in the final settlement 
with Spain had kept the Philippine Islands, largely through 
England's influence, in order to prevent their falUng into 
the hands of some other power. 

We could easily have annexed Cuba, and with some show 
of reason. But, at the outbreak of the war, in order to 
exhibit to the world our disinterestedness, we had denied 
any purpose of conquest. We had not even dreamed of 
such a thing as acquiring the Philippines, and our desire 
for colonial empire was even less than our fitness for it. 
But, in the end, we kept the Philippines through the logical 
process of excluding all other solutions one by one. We 
precipitated thereby a great domestic poHtical controversy 
over an issue which called itself " imperiaUsm." 

It was a wholesome contest, because it forced us to a 
searching of hearts and a clarifying of motives. It drove 
us to the clear perception that the acquisition and govern- 
ment of outlying possessions was for us an exceptional and 
an abnormal matter, rather than an orderly and desirable 
development of our political life and system. In the great 
debate of the year 1900, the country specifically accepted 
and justified our Philippine policy in view of the circum- 
stances that surrounded it. But the country held the party 
in power to ordinances of self-denial and altruism, in respect 



PROBLEMS OP FOREIGN POLICY AND EXPANSION 239 

of the Philippines, that were even more exacting than those 
accepted in the case of Cuba. We were not to exploit the 
Philippines for our own political or commercial benefit, 
were not to subject them to the carpet-bag rule of adven- 
turous or discredited Americans, were not to use them as 
a key to future domination in the Pacific. 

Our principles of action in the Philippines were defined 
in the system for governing them established by Mr. Root 
as Secretary of War and put into operation by Mr. Taft 
as Governor-General. It was a policy for the immediate 
creation of municipal and local self-governing units; for 
the opening of all positions in the civil service by prefer- 
ence to native Filipinos; for the military pohcing of the 
islands by natives; for the universal establishment of 
schools; for an improved administration of justice under 
appropriate civil and penal codes, with native judges in 
so far as possible; for the election of a Philippine legisla- 
ture at the earliest possible date ; for tariff and tax systems 
favorable to Philippine revenue and trade, and for the post- 
ponement of the question of ultimate sovereignty until the 
Philippines should actually have come into existence as a 
political entity. 

This Philippine imdertaking has already proved a costly 
and difficult one, but its lessons have been so salutary as 
to have justified it. It has placed upon our government 
delicate responsibilities, which have changed our whole 
attitude toward the world at large. It has sobered and 
dignified our diplomacy, and has reacted very favorably 
upon our political conditions at home. It has led us to a 
deeper study of all the problems of politics and administra- 
tion, and has strengthened, rather than weakened, our belief 
in the old American ideal of a homogeneous republic. Porto 



240 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

Rico is comparatively small, and we can doubtless afford to 
give the Porto Rican people as individuals the status of 
American citizens, — while developing in their island, as in 
the Hawaiian group, a form of republican self-government 
suited to their conditions, and giving it a political mem- 
bership in our sisterhood of states analogous to that of a 
territory. But the Philippines are more distant, and pre- 
sumably have in store a different destiny. 

At some future time, opposing views about that destiny 
may take the form of a live political problem in this coun- 
try. But, for the present, the Philippine question in its 
larger bearing has been met, and the result has been 
accepted by both parties. There will be difference of opin- 
ion about the extent of the concessions we should grant 
to Philippine products in our markets, and many other 
questions of detail will obtrude themselves, and will help 
to round out the programs of self-praise and of accusation, 
as parties wage their periodical campaigns. 

The fact that we were present in the Philippines with a 
considerable military force, enabled us to take an impor- 
tant part in the joint expedition of the Powers which fol- 
lowed the Boxer uprising against foreigners in China. It 
enabled us also to exert more influence than we should 
otherwise have had on behalf of what was called the '^ open 
door" in China at a time when Russia seemed on the point 
of annexing Manchuria and Korea, with a view to monopo- 
lizing their trade. It gave us added weight in the making 
of international opinion against the dismemberment of the 
Chinese Empire. 

Not least important of the events and policies that fol- 
lowed our undertaking on behalf of Cuba, was the determi- 
nation that an isthmian canal must be built, and that it 



PROBLEMS OF FOREIGN POLICY AND EXPANSION 241 

must be under the political guarantee and control of the 
United States. In a period before the Civil War, when a 
canal project seemed likely to be realized, England and 
the United States signed the so-called " Bulwer-Clayton 
Treaty," which was meant to secure political neutrality for 
the canal, the other great powers of Europe being expected 
to add their signatures to the treaty. The agreement 
covered various matters, the terms of which were at once 
disregarded by both powers. The document was never 
urged upon the continental countries for their signature. 
The immediate project of canal digging to which it referred 
was abandoned. The treaty existed merely as a paper 
instrument which, according to official declarations of 
many American Presidents and Secretaries of State, had 
never gone into effect, and was not to be regarded as of 
any validity. 

In the seventies and eighties, American capitalists un- 
dertook to secure construction of the canal by the Nica- 
ragua route, while M. de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez 
Canal, under a concession from Colombia, was entering with 
great enthusiasm upon the project of a canal across the 
Isthmus of Panama. Both of these projects proved too 
large for private capitalists. The French Company had 
spent fabulous sums, and failed under scandalous circum- 
stances. Such was the situation when an American battle- 
ship on our Pacific coast made its memorable voyage 
around the continent of South America in order to join 
our fleet in Cuban waters. The same sort of irresistible 
public opinion which had driven us to liberate Cuba forced 
the government to adopt the policy of building an isthmian 
canal as a part of our shore line for purposes of defense. 

I am speaking of political pohcy, and not of matters less 



242 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OP AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

essentially related thereto. And so I shall not dwell upon 
those chapters of recent history which led to our abandon- 
ment of the Nicaragua route after we had chosen it, and 
to our purchase from the French Company of its assets and 
rights at Panama. Nor shall I discuss the mistake of the 
first Hay-Pauncefote treaty, which, in abrogating — for 
purposes of good form — the discredited Bulwer-Clayton 
convention, went much farther and provided that a canal 
to be constructed at the cost of the United States Treasury 
should be neutralized under the political guarantee of all 
the maritime powers of Europe. The treaty was revised, 
and we retained the right, which in any case we should 
have exercised, to control our own canal; although we 
solemnly pledged ourselves to do what no one had asked of 
us, namely, to give all powers, for their ships of war as well 
as of commerce, exactly the same use of the canal as we 
retained for ourselves. 

We had failed after the war between the states to avail 
ourselves of our easy opportunity to fix forever the form 
of our development by acquiring British North America. 
We were now, after our war with Spain, in a mood of 
domestic harmony. Sectionalism no longer disturbed our 
grasp upon larger pohcies. The determination to build 
an isthmian canal of some sort, like the first vote of money 
for the Cuban expedition, was with almost absolute unani- 
mity in Congress. We had acquired Porto Rico, had se- 
cured coaling and naval stations from Cuba, and had pro- 
vided for a Cuban republic under the terms of what was 
virtually an American protectorate. We had acquired the 
Hawaiian Islands, Guam, and the Philippines. The com- 
pletion of our larger policy required an isthmian canal under 
our own control, as a virtual extension of our coast-line. 



PROBLEMS OF FOREIGN POLICY AND EXPANSION 243 

To construct such a canal did not mean that we should 
annex the republics north of it nor unduly dominate those 
south of it. But it meant, of necessity, an important devel- 
opment of our policy toward those republics, and toward 
the future of the West Indies and the Caribbean Sea. It 
was, in every sense, to the interest of the South American 
Republic of Colombia to have om- government purchase 
the assets of the failed French Company and build the 
Panama Canal. But the government of Colombia at that 
moment was neither responsible nor representative, and it 
adopted a mercenary pohcy which defeated its own objects. 
The Isthmus of Panama declared its independence from 
Colombia, our government promptly recognized and pro- 
tected its withdrawal, the canal zone was purchased from 
the new government at Panama rather than from the 
authorities at Bogota, the Republic of Panama was estab- 
lished under our auspices and virtual guarantee, and the 
President proceeded to carry on the work of construction 
where the French Company had left it off. 

The completion of the canal must have a profoimd effect 
upon our future development as well as upon that of other 
countries. It will have a tendency to bring the turbulent 
Central-American republics into a state of order necessary 
to their economic development. It would seem not im- 
probable that they might be led to a permanent confedera- 
tion in union with the RepubUc of Panama, under the 
same sort of guarantee for internal order and sound finance 
as now protects both Panama and Cuba. It is to be 
assumed, fm^ther, that our close relations with Mexico 
will develop of themselves without need of written guar- 
antees. As respects San Domingo and Haiti, our natural 
policy will be one of endeavor to save them from too 



244 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

frequent revolutions at home, and financial misadventures 
abroad. The ratification of the San Domingo treaty 
early in 1907 was more significant than was commonly 
understood. That treaty will enable us to protect finan- 
cial interests and to aid in the orderly progress of a rich 
but turbulent island republic. 

As for Venezuela and Colombia, our desire will be to 
help keep them afloat as republics until able and wise 
men safely control their destinies. It is to be expected 
that the growth of their economic interests may give them, 
for a time, a stability like that of Mexico, after which they 
may develop a citizenship much more capable than at pres- 
ent of keeping domestic peace and carrying on the institu- 
tions of government. As Brazil and the Argentine Repub- 
lic and Chili go forward in their present development of 
wealth and political stability, the Monroe Doctrine, so far 
as they are concerned, will mean only a friendly recognition 
of the earher good intentions of the United States. As the 
ideals of peace and justice advance in the world, republics 
situated hke these three have less and ever less to fear from 
external foes. 

It was a serious moment when President Cleveland and 
Mr. Olney took steps which made it necessary for England 
and Venezuela to accept arbitration in order to fix a per- 
manent and final boundary line between the helpless 
republic and the ever encroaching colony of British Guiana. 
But it was an instance in the assertion of the Monroe Doc- 
trine that was salutary in the end. It has led to a suc- 
cessive rectification of frontiers in South America and 
North America by diplomatic negotiation, and in several 
cases by arbitration, with the result of doing away with 
differences which might have led to war. It was a step, 



PROBLEMS OF FOREIGN POLICY AND EXPANSION 245 

fiirthermore, which made it easier for a later adminis- 
tration to end a European raid upon Venezuela — with 
a blockade and a prospective seizure of territory — on 
the pretext of collecting various private debts. The au- 
thority of our government caused the withdrawal of the 
expedition, the submission of pecuniary claims to proper 
tribunals, and the payment of the awards by an orderly 
process. 

Such steps on the part of our government will help to 
bring about permanent conditions of peace and order in 
the world through the establishment of right doctrines 
respecting governmental intervention in matters of private 
business. Our South American neighbors have developed 
principles and ideals of law, government, and international 
relationship that are far in advance of the average condi- 
tions of their citizenship. But the ideals of leadership 
may greatly affect in the end the training of a body of 
citizens capable of social self-control and of the working 
of political institutions. It is no time to lose faith in 
democratic government, whether for ourselves or for other 
nations. On the contrary, we have arrived at a period in 
our national progress when it would seem possible for us to 
advance along the lines of those principles with better 
assurance and less agitation than at any previous moment. 

We were able to carry out our Cuban policy with good 
effect, because it had the overwhelming approval of our own 
public opinion regardless of party. Our latest intervention 
in the affairs of Cuba has been effective through its reason- 
ableness, its practical usefulness, and the unbroken support 
it has received from every right-minded organ of American 
opinion. If the Democrats should succeed the Republicans 
in power, they could do nothing else for Porto Rico, Hawaii, 



246 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

or the Philippines than to emulate the present administra- 
tion in its sincere effort to promote human well-being in 
those island dependencies. 

The completion of the Panama Canal will benefit all 
nations, and it will come in the fullness of time for our own 
developments of trade. It will give us convenient access 
to the South American and Oriental seaports at a time when 
the further development of our manufactures will make it 
necessary for us to apply ourselves in earnest to the culti- 
vation of our foreign commerce. It will strengthen us in 
the strategic sense, because it will enable our ships of war 
to pass quickly from our Atlantic to our Pacific coast. It 
will bring us into closer relations with South America in 
ways that will strengthen our influence and aid in the stable 
progress of Brazil and the Spanish-speaking republics. 

Our recent experiences have been useful in that they have 
sufficed to show us that we do not wish to extend our gov- 
ernmental authority any further if we can avoid it, with the 
one great exception of our growing willingness to join for- 
tunes with Canada, if, at some future time, the Dominion 
should so desire. At present, the Dominion is in a position 
at once very favorable and very uncertain. Belonging 
nominally to the British Empire, it is under the protec- 
tion of England's great fleet. But its chief protection 
lies in the policy and the good-will of the United States. 
So long as Canada avoids participation in Old World 
broils and disputes, this country can permit no foreign 
power to interfere with the Dominion's peace and self- 
directed activities. 

England has vast interests in all parts of the world. 
Canada has had no part in the creation of those interests, 
and none whatever in their management or control, nor 



PROBLEMS OF FOREIGN POLICY AND EXPANSION 247 

have they ministered in any way to her profit or security. 
With England's adventure against Dutch repubUcs in South 
Africa, Canada had no proper relationship of any sort. It 
was a fundamental error of the most dangerous kind for 
Canada to send troops to South Africa, and thus take a 
voluntary part in the war of a great empire against two 
minute republics. For it is obvious, on a moment's reflec- 
tion, that Germany or some other European power might 
have become involved in the contest against England, and 
Canada's meddling in the strife would have justified a 
transfer of the scene of hostilities to North America. But 
nothing could be more fundamentally contrary to the policy 
under which we tolerate the political separateness of the 
country north of us, than the habit of participation in 
European, Asiatic, and African wars. 

If Canada may join England in foreign wars over ques- 
tions that do not concern Canada, the result, under the 
established rules of international law, might be the con- 
quest of a part or the whole of the Dominion by a European 
power or coalition. But this, in tm'n, would disturb the 
reasonable conditions of tranquillity which we have pre- 
scribed for the proper development of North America. So 
long as England is at peace, Canada is in a favorable posi- 
tion, because her security is jointly guaranteed by England 
and the United States. But if Canada should regard her- 
self as a militant vassal of the chief naval power of Europe, 
her position might, at some future time, cause us very seri- 
ous disturbance. 

From her own standpoint, Canada has four possible 
futures. From our standpoint, she has only two. As 
it appears at Ottawa, she may, first, continue in the pres- 
ent anomalous and ill-defined relationship to the British 



248 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

Empire; second, she may take a representative and re- 
sponsible part in helping to govern the British Empire, 
along the line of Mr. Chamberlain's imperial federation 
projects; third, she may become an independent member 
of the family of nations, having close relations with Eng- 
land and the United States, but exercising full sovereignty 
on her own behalf ; or, fourth, she may return to the views 
of thirty years ago and accept annexation. 

From the standpoint of the development of our policy, 
on the other hand, Canada, must cut loose from European 
political ties and accept full responsibility as a member of 
the family of nations, or else merge her political destinies 
with ours. As I have said, we missed the opportunity for 
an ideal solution forty years ago, and all parties at interest 
must now await — in patience and with friendliness and 
self-control, though some dread may attend the waiting — 
the arrival of that inevitable crisis which will compel 
Canada to make a decision. 

We have come to a period when the complexity of human 
interests makes strife of all kinds too costly and undesirable 
to be entertained in a spirit of recklessness. As I have 
tried to show in all these discussions, our citizenship is spe- 
cializing and perfecting its instruments of government, while 
the government is ever trying to build up an effective 
citizenship. We seek in the field of domestic pohtics to 
reduce by all reasonable means the areas of controversy. 
The supreme effort of our administration at the present 
moment, is so to mediate between the conflicting forces 
of our industrial and economic life as to prevent the hard- 
ening of antagonisms and the development of another 
political contest as extreme and as intense as the money 
fight, and others through which we have already passed. 



PROBLEMS OF FOREIGN POLICY AND EXPANSION 249 

With these efforts to keep our internal political life sane, 
moderate, reasonable, and progressive, a like tendency is 
observable in our relationships toward other countries. 
The ideals of nationalism still hold men firmly, and we shall 
not make progress toward world harmony in our age from 
any other standpoint, Russia will insist upon develop- 
ment as a Russian nationality, irrespective of those political 
convulsions which attend her efforts to modernize her insti- 
tutions. United Italy, united Germany, triumphant Japan, 
and France despite all drawbacks, choose to face the future 
in their distinct and separate roles as nations, impelled by 
their own aims and held together by their own bonds of 
association, making up what, in our first chapter, we dis- 
cussed as constituting the modern state. 

We in the United States must accept the responsibility 
of a great place among the nations. We must be strong 
for the sake of our destiny, our dignity, our influence, and 
our usefulness. The fact that we have a beneficial theory 
of progress for the Western Hemisphere republics, which 
we sometimes exemplify in practical emergencies, and which 
we call the Monroe Doctrine, cannot divest us of one single 
shred of the responsibility that may fall to us in helping to 
work out in an orderly and peaceful way the problems of 
the Pacific Ocean and the Farther East. It was our mission 
to introduce Japan to the nations of the Western world, 
and our relations with Korea and China have been excep- 
tional in their friendliness and in their power to bear fruit 
in future offices of usefulness and good-will. 

Our experience has sufficed to convince us that we wish 
to govern ourselves with a common language and under 
familiar laws and customs, upon the continent of North 
America. The responsibilities of greatness and power will 



250 POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT 

be costly, for we shall have to maintain a powerful navy, 
and be prepared at all moments to do our share toward 
keeping the world's peace and order. But it will be the 
business of our statesmanship to remove causes of disagree- 
ment in every direction, and to seek the establishment at 
home and abroad of high standards of justice. 

There has never been so wide-spread harmony in matters 
political throughout the United States as in these years of 
the first decade of the twentieth century. There are many 
questions of disagreement, but the margins of difference 
are narrow, the demand for honesty and public spirit in po- 
litical life is clear and strong, and one party might succeed 
the other in control of administration without shock or 
strain, certainly without violent reversals of accustomed 
pohcy. And as there has been unusual agreement in the 
field of domestic political life, so also there has been unprece- 
dented harmony in our relationships with other countries. 

We have never been on terms of cordiality more sincere 
and unfeigned with England, France, and Germany, than 
at the present time. Spain begins to perceive that we 
rendered her an inestimable service at the end of the nine- 
teenth century, and that we did it without ill-will, though in 
a rude and humiliating manner. The ill-will of Colombia, 
on account of our virtual seizure of Panama, will disappear 
with the realization of the vast benefits that Colombia, 
beyond any other South American country, is to receive 
from a canal that connects her frontages on two oceans. 
Japanese statesmanship is too intelligent to misunderstand 
a pohcy that deliberately proposes to build up the American 
states, from Maine to California, upon the basis of a citi- 
zenship of unmixed white population, with economic and 
political standards unmodified by Asiatic immigration. 



PROBLEMS OF FOREIGN POLICY AND EXPANSION 251 

The time is evidently one favorable for progress not merely 
in friendly sentiment among nations, but also for substantial 
gains in methods by which to prevent war and to diminish 
the chances of serious dispute. It is a time for progress in 
the rules and agreements which make up the so-called law 
of nations, and for the further development of influence and 
authority in world conferences and tribunals like the limited 
one held in 1906 for our hemisphere at Rio, and the gen- 
eral ones that assemble from time to time at The Hague. If 
not just now, then in the comparatively near future there 
should appear such political progress in the domestic life 
of nations and in their relations with one another, as to 
make it easily possible to reduce the burden of armaments, 
to get rid of the manifold evils of militarism, and to dis- 
tribute equitably the duties of international police work. 

But it must be a good while yet before any scheme of 
international organization can subordinate to itself the aims 
and ambitions of developing peoples whose patriotism cen- 
ters in their allegiance to their own country. And as their 
patriotism grows in a diffused intelligence, it would seem 
inevitable that their political life should take on our own 
democratic spirit, if not our precise democratic forms. 
Our political growth and experience in America has 
demonstrated the wisdom of those who founded our ui- 
stitutions; and with an amazing transformation of facili- 
ties and social conditions, we seem not to have changed 
the essential aims of our political structure, which are those 
of orderly freedom, of equal opportunity, and of democratic 
brotherhood upon a high level of intelligence and social 
well-being. 



INDEX 



Adams, J. Q., Secretary of State, 226. 

Adirondack forest reserve, 110. 

Administrative work. Requirements 
of, 143. 

Agriculture, Department of. Work of, 
in the South, 83. 

Agriculture, Western, Building up of, 
100, 106. 

Aims, Essential, of our political 
structure, 251. 

Alaska, Purchase of, 230, 231 ; 
boundary dispute settled, 232. 

Algeciras, Conference at, 20. 

Alleghanies, Growth of the nation 
beyond the, 27. 

America no field for European colo- 
nial adventure, 226. 

American boy. Pioneer training of 
the, 42. 

American colonies, Homogeneous 
citizenship of the, 19, 34; high 
diffusion of intelligence in the, 34. 

American Colonization Society, Fu- 
tile efforts of the, 49. 

American Forestry Association, 110. 

American life. Nature and meaning of 
pontics in, 1-29 ; standards of, 
higher than those of immigrants, 
70. 

American national life exempt from 
poUtical problems of Europe, 17. 

American people, Confidence of, in 
their destiny, 34-35, 127; trans- 
formation of the, 74. 

American personaUty, Impress of the 
Indian upon, 41, 44. 

American repubhc. Beginnings of, 
21. 

Americans a composite European 
race, 73-74. 

Anti-slavery sentiment, 50-52. 



Argentine Republic and the Monroe 
Doctrine, 244. 

Arid lands, 101 ; given to Western 
states, 103 ; productive under irri- 
gation, 103 ; are now leased, 108. 

Arid states. Importance of develop- 
ment of, 106-107. 

Aristocracy, A social, in both North- 
ern and Southern colonies, 45-46; 
accentuated in South by slavery, 
48, 84. 

Army, Regular, reduced to a skele- 
ton, 142. 

Articles of Confederation, The, 22. 

Assessments and taxes for political 
purposes, 138-139, 141-142. 

Assimilation, Forces of attrition and, 
great in New York, 73 ; unprece- 
dented task of, 74 ; requires special 
social and public movements, 75- 
76 ; to make a homogeneous popu- 
lation, 116-117. 

Asylum, Doctrine of free, main- 
tained, 59, 62; will be continued, 
116-117. 

Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, Land 
grants to, 95. 

Australia, Economic tendencies in, 
10. 

Austria-Hungary, The dual monar- 
chy of, 9. 

Austro-Hungarian immigrants, 58. 

Bagehot an evolutionary thinker, 4. 

Balance of power between state 
and individuaUsm not changing, 
10-11. 

Ballot paper. Official, prevents bri- 
bery, 150. 

Banking and insurance regulated by 
government, 223. 



253 



254 



INDEX 



Banking law of 1863, 211-212. 

Black Belt, Concentration in, 85. 

Blaine and Cleveland campaign of 
1884 decided by ballot-box frauds, 
159. 

Bland-Allison Compromise Act of 
1878, 217. 

Bonded indebtedness, Questions of, 
submitted to popular vote, 152- 
153. 

Bolt, The, a party corrective, 140- 
141. 

Boss, The party, 146; and corpora- 
tion money, 148-149 ; revolt 
against, in many states, 161. 

Boss systems. Worst evils of, in- 
trenched in great cities, 156 ; 
known and exposed, 156. 

Brazil and the Monroe Doctrine, 
244. 

British Islands, Immigration from 
the, 54. 

British North America offered to us 
at end of Civil War, 231-233 ; our 
failure to accept, 232, 242. 

Bryan, William J., and his policy, 183, 
192. 

Bulwer-Clayton Treaty, The, 241. 

Calhoun and Webster, Flawless logic 
of each, 25 ; national leaders, 227. 

California Spanish territory, 31 ; 
held by Mexico, 33 ; acquisition 
and admission of, 90-91 ; pur- 
chased for freedom, 228. 

Canada, Reciprocity with, unwisely 
discontinued, 202 ; constructive 
economic development in, 203,206 ; 
favored the Northern cause, 229; 
ready for annexation, 231 ; an- 
nexation of, within our grasp, 
231, 233; advantages of close re- 
lation with, 233; should be made 
our best friend, 235 ; our feeling 
toward, 246; relations of, with 
the old world, 246-247; has four 
possible futures, 247-248; from 
the standpoint of our policy, 248. 

Canada's Indian problem, 43. 

Canadian Indians and the French 
trappers, 43. 



Canadian Northwest developed by 
Americans, 234. 

Canadians alienated, 233. 

Canals and railroads projected on 
paper, 93. 

Capital and labor, 18; Government 
mediates between, 122. 

Capital drawn from the East and 
from Europe, 96-98; European, 
invested in American manufactur- 
ing, 198 ; private, not adequate to 
large undertakings, 168-169. 

Carolinas, Settlers from the, in 
Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, 38; 
in Tennessee, Alabama, Missouri, 
and Arkansas, 54. 

Cattle and hog trust, 175. 

Cattle companies. Fraudulent de- 
vices of, 103 ; lands held by, will 
be leased, 108. 

Cattle ranching on limited pasturage 
a failure, 102. 

Caucuses and conventions under 
boss control, 148. 

Central and South American dis- 
putes with European powers. Our 
attitude and action toward, 235- 
236. 

Central Pacific Railroad subsidy, 94. 

Children, State must regulate indus- 
trial employment of, 75 ; efl&cient 
training of, for citizenship, 69, 72, 
123, 154. 

Chili and the Monroe Doctrine, 
244. 

China, The "open door" in, and our 
influence, 240 ; Boxer uprising in, 
and our part in its suppression, 
240; our relations with, 249. 

Chinese exclusion act. Importance of 
the, 64; labor on the Pacific coast, 
62-64 ; laborers. Admission of, sus- 
pended, 63. 

Choctaws removed to Indian Ter- 
ritory, 43. 

Church and state. Conflicting claims 
of, 8: 

Citizen, The, and the community, 8, 
20; and his part in politics, 116- 
144. 

Citizens make the state, 126. 



INDEX 



255 



Citizenship, American, made national 
by the 14th and 15th Amend- 
ments, 78. 

Citizenship, American, solidaritj'' of, 
to be maintained, 61, 116-117, 
' 122. 

Citizenship and government. Rela- 
tions of, 30. 

Citizenship and population. Con- 
structive problems of, 30-61. 

Citizenship and the state, 15-16. 

Citizenship, Equality of, 21 ; fitness 
of, 24; government the chief con- 
cern of, 30 ; molding children for, 
72; a national universal, will 
stand, 81 ; concern of government 
to shape its, aright, 121 ; what it 
has done for the citizen body, 122- 
126. 

Citizenship, Homogeneous, in the 
colonies, 19 ; development of, 34 ; 
national policy for, 36 ; intention 
of Congress to create, 40 ; prob- 
lems of, 46, 49, 185. 

Citizenship, Our, and our govern- 
ment, their respective special aims, 
248; training and intelligence of, 
99-100. 

Civil Service Reform movement. The, 
142-144, 160. 

Civil War, The, 225; Crucial ques- 
tions, domestic and foreign, led to, 
228. 

Clay and Webster favored time and 
compromises in political contro- 
versy, 25 ; national leaders, 227. 

Coal trust, 174-175. 

Collectivism and private enterprise, 
167-169, 180. 

Colombia, Republic of. Mercenary 
policy of, 243 ; our policy toward, 
244; ill-will of, will disappear, 
250. 

Colonies, The thirteen, and their 
federal compact, 26. 

Colonization, Period and sources of, 
30-32, 58. 

Colonization company, American, 
49. 

Combination in business. Normal 
development of, cannot be checked. 



189 ; stringent checks proposed, 
190. 

Combinations in restraint of trade 
forbidden, 183. 

Commerce between the states. Power 
to regulate called into use, 170-171 . 

Commerce, domestic, 95 per cent of 
our total trade, 204. 

Commerce, Our, nationalized by free 
trade between all the states, 195. 

Commercial congresses, Trans-Mis- 
sissippi, 104. 

Common carriers. Changed relations 
of, 186-188. 

Common law. Principles of, revived, 
186. 

Communities, The new, eager for 
population and development, 88; 
drew capital from the East and 
from Europe, 96; high intelli- 
gence of, 100-101. 

Competition and non-competitive 
economic life, 183. 

Confederate cruisers equipped by 
British aid, 229; lawsuit for 
damages from, 230. 

Conservatism and radicalism, 10, 12. 

Conservatives and liberals. Differ- 
ences between, a question of dates, 
23. 

Constitution of 1787, The, 22. 

Constitution, The, provides for ad- 
naission but not for withdrawal 
or exiDulsion of a state, 28. 

Constitutional amendments of a 
statutory character, 152-153. 

Constitutional history. Our, not 
analogous to that of England or 
European countries, 22. 

Constitutions, Final value of written 
federal, 26-27; state, 152. 

Continental notes, 210. 

Continental people. Process of creat- 
ing a, 36-37. 

Corporations and legislation, 147- 
149 ; and politics, 165 ; victims 
of their own system, 165; com- 
plaints against, 168; great, doing 
interstate business should be super- 
vised, 183; organized for self- 
protection, 186, 



25C 



INDEX 



Cotton gin, Invention of, strength- 
ened slave system, 25; revolu- 
tionized agriculture and commerce 
in the South, 197. 

Cotton growing, Expansion of, in the 
South, 197, 228. 

County system, The Southern, 35; 
the "Western, 36. 

Credit Mobilier scandal, 234. 

Creeks removed to Indian Territory, 
43. 

Criminal recruits from American- 
born children of immigrants, 69. 

Cuba, Our relations to, and world 
politics, 20; our tariff relations 
with, 202; revolutions in, and 
revolt against Spain, 236 ; our 
intervention in, and its results, 
237-238, 242. 

Cuban policy. Our, approved by pub- 
lic opinion, 245. 

Currency reform questions to be 
dealt with, 221-222. 

Dakotas, Rapid settlement of, 100; 
disaster in, through drought, 101. 

Declaration of Independence, 22. 

Defensive forces an econoraic in- 
surance, 208. 

Democracy, American, no change 
in spirit or purpose of, 114, 
118. 

Democracy, Development of social, 
hampered in the South by slavery, 
48-49. 

Democratic experiment. The one 
great, of the modern world, 34. 

Democratic government. Faith in, 
for ourselves and for other na- 
tions, 245. 

Democratic idealism for free trade. 
Basis of, 200, 203. 

Democratic ideals. Modern, and the 
state, 9-10, 19. 

Democratic institutions. Transform- 
ing power of, 60-61; 116-117; 
based upon high intelligence, 
capacity, and well-being, the aim of 
government, 209. 

Democratic life. Great vigor of, in the 
larger cities, 156. 



Democratic life and expression, Long 
fight for freedom of, 165. 

Democratic party, The, 133-136; 
captured by leaders of the slave 
power, 133-134; has entire field 
in Southern states, 136. 

Democratic spirit, Political life of 
developing peoples taking on, 251. 

Democrats congenial to Irish inuni- 
grants, 133 ; in 1896 changed 
national issue from tariff to money 
question, 204; in 1900 to imperi- 
alism, 204; could make no tariff 
change when in power under 
Cleveland, 205 ; and our island 
dependencies, 245-246. 

Desert land law abused, 108. 

Development, National, after the 
Civil War, 198 ; the mission of 
American politics, 201. 

Development, Natural, should be 
allowed without arbitrary re- 
straints, 188. 

Differences, Imaginary, produce real, 
50; between the East and the 
middle West disappeared, 118- 
119. 

Dingley high tariff of 1897, 203-204 ; 
Democrats will undoubtedly re- 
vise if successful in 1908, 205. 

Discrimination in railroad rates for- 
bidden, 171 ; trusts created by, 175- 
176; endeavors to abolish, 181. 

Domain, Extension of, an element 
of national growth, 33-34 ; settle- 
ment and use of the national, 87— 
115; to be distributed to actual 
settlers, 89-90. 

Economic enterprises, Absorption of, 
167. 

Economic forces. Regulation of, the 
American pohcy, 167, 170. 

Economic freedom and personal 
initiative maintained, 11, 166-167, 
189, 223. 

Economic life of the people recog- 
nized, 10-11 ; not the task of 
government to assume the func- 
tions of the, 166; become more 
complex, 166-167. 



INDEX 



257 



Economic mobility, 60-61, 72-73. 

Economic problems, Transitional, 
following emancipation, 117. 

Economic questions. Result of polit- 
ical controversy over, 223. 

Economic regulation, Problems of, 
166-193. 

Economic resources. Failure to pre- 
vent diversion of, into the hands 
of a few, 185. 

Economic system, new logic of, 18. 

Economic systems. Antagonism of, 
ended by abolition of slavery, 117. 

Economic world establishes its own 
laws, 222. 

Education, elementary, Claims of 
church and state over, 8. 

Education the foremost task of en- 
lightened statesmanship, 74. See 
also Public schools and Schools. 

Elections, State, held in off years, 161. 

England, Political opportunity for 
ordinary citizen in, 128 ; second 
war with, 225 ; effects of, 226-227 ; 
offered us its great territories of 
the Northwest, 230, 233; favored 
annexation of Canada, 231 ; our 
relations with, 250. 

England's sympathy for the South, 
229. 

English colonization. Extent and 
quality of, 30-31, 33, 224. 

English language, The, our great 
necessary bond, 66. 

English political life, Whole spirit of, 
aristocratic, 128. 

English-speaking population, An, 
30. 

Enterprises of national moment too 
great for private capital, 168. 

Equality of opportunity and social 
mobility, 45-46, 122. 

Equality of rights and opportunities 
a dominant doctrine, 5, 166-167, 
189, 223. 

Eras of good feeling, 120-121. 

Erie Canal, The, 93. 

Europe nationalistic and protective, 
206. 

European colonial adventure, Amer- 
ica no field for, 226. 



European nations, national life of, 
17. 

Eiu-opean sovereignties, InstabiUty 
of, in the Napoleonic epoch, 26. 

Exiropean states. Difficulties of mod- 
ernizing relationships in, 17 ; long 
fight for manhood suffrage in, 18. 

Exchange, Freedom of, must be 
maintained, 189. 

Exports, Prohibition of taxes on, 195. 

Families, Migration westward of 
interrelated, 37. 

Farming system. Free, of the old 
Northwest, 90. 

Federal compact. The, became a mere 
legal theory, 27. 

Federal union. Continuance of, an 
object of concern, 24. 

Federalists, The, 133. 

Federation, limited, Tendency of 
experience toward, 21. 

Federative balance between central 
government and local authorities 
maintained, 12. 

Fenianism encouraged, 233. 

Finance, Wide knowledge of prob- 
lems of, 99. 

Financial administration. Training 
in, afforded by municipal, town- 
ship and county offices, 130. 

Fishing rights, The Northeast and 
our, 227 ; England willing to settle 
claims for, 231. 

Flag, Our, the emblem of an un- 
questioned sovereignty, 22. 

Florida owned by Spain, 31, 224; 
purchased, 227. 

Food products. World-wide effect of 
cheapening, 97. 

Foreign pohcy. Problems of, 224-251. 

Foreign questions. Opportunity to 
settle all, rejected by our politi- 
cians, 233. 

Foreigners, Americanizing, 58-59, 61, 
70, 116-117. 

Forest areas. Destruction of, in 
building up prairie states, 109 ; held 
bjr lumber kings, 112. 

Forest reserves. Creation of, 105, 
108-109, 111-112, 118. 



258 



INDEX 



Forestry Association, American, 
110. 

Forestry policy. National, adopted, 
110, 118. 

Fortunes, personal, Undue extent of, 
184 ; acquisition of large, must not 
be at expense of 'moderate, 185. 

France, Territorial possessions of, 31, 
224; as a nationality, 249; our 
relations with, cordial, 250. 

Franchise, Extension of the, in Eng- 
land and in Europe, 9 ; restricting 
the, in case of the foreign-born, 
65-66; problems of the, 116-134. 

Free homestead legislation, 91-92. 

Free silver swept Republicans of the 
far West to William Bryan, 136. 

Free Soil party. The, 133. 

Free trade between all the states, 195. 

Free trade tariff of 1846, reduced in 
1857, 196. 

Freeman, Edward A., Historico- 
political notions of, 4. 

French and Indian War, 31-32. 

French colonization, Extent of, 30- 
32, 224. 

French Revolution, Effect of, on 
Americans, 224-225. 

Game of politics. The, 16, 127, 131. 

Gas and electric lighting services 
monopolistic and also public, 188. 

Geneva arbitration and its loss to 
us, 232. 

Georgia cedes Mississippi Territory 
to the Union, 39 ; settlers from, 
flocking across the mountains, 54. 

German-Americans, Younger, losing 
acquaintance with German lan- 
guage, 68 ; a fading distinction, 69. 

German and Irish stock engaged in 
Americanizing foreigners, 68-69. 

German inamigrants to Pennsyl- 
vania, 54 ; to the West, 55-56, 68, 
91 ; drawn to the Republicans, 133 ; 
driven to the Democrats by Pro- 
hibition movement, 135. 

German industrial progress has re- 
duced emigration, 57. 

Germanic confederations and em- 
pires, Variety of, 26. 



Germany, Sweeping away of feudal 
privileges in, 10. 

Germany, United, as a nationality, 
249 ; our relations with, most cor- 
dial, 250. 

Gold and silver. Ratio of, 214. 

Gold, Discovery of, in California, 90, 
92; increased production of, set- 
tled the money question, 136 ; 
enormous recent production of, 
220, 221 ; answers business world 
for a standard, 222. 

Gold reserve. The, threatened by 
the "endless chain," 219. 

Gold standard. The, drew Eastern 
Democrats to the Republicans, 
135-136. 

Governing power. Distribution of, 
7-8. 

Government, expense of. Great, 208. 

Government in America, The pur- 
poses of, 142. 

Government ownership. Conceivable 
advantages of, 182. 

Government, Unquestioned suprem- 
acy of, to be maintained, 166 ; 
extending the business activities 
of the, 167-169. 

Grain elevator monopoly, 175. 

Granger movement. The, 178-179. 

Grazing belt. Conditions in the, 102- 
103, 108-109. 

Grazing lands. Methods of leasing, 
112, 114, 118. 

Greeley, Horace, and the New York 
Weekly Tribune, 163. 

Greenback movement. The, 135. 

Greenbackers, Doctrine of the, 213, 
216. 

Greenbacks, Issue of, 212; struggle 
over their proper place in our 
currency system, 213 ; inflation 
of, vetoed by President Grant, 215 ; 
retirement of, stopped, 216. 

Gulf of Mexico belonged to Spain, 31. 

Hague Conference, The first, 20. 
Hague Tribunal, The, 20. 
Haiti, Our policy toward, 243-244. 
Hamilton, Alexander, on a tariff to 
encourage industries, 195. 



INDEX 



259 



Harper's Weekly under editorship of 

George William Curtis, 163. 
Hawaiian Islands included in our 

economic zone, 202. 
Hay-Pa\mcefote Treaty, The, 242. 
Hayes and Tilden election. The, 158- 

159. 
Holy Alliance, The, 226. 
Homestead principle appUed to land 

grants to railroads, 95. 
Homesteads located fraudulently, 

108. 
House of Commons, Few men hope 

to enter, 128. 

Illinois, Blending of settlers in, 38; 
conditions for settlement of, pre- 
scribed in Ordinance of 1787, 38- 
39; growth of, 53; free farming 
in, 90. 

Illiteracy among poorer whites of the 
South, 77 ; negro iUiteracy dimin- 
ishing, 82. 

Immigrants, European, not willing 
to go to slave states, 55 ; propa- 
ganda conducted by, 57 ; better 
distribution of, required, 66. 

Immigration, 54-61, 71 ; character 
of original, 54; British and Ger- 
man, 54, 91; Irish, 55-56, 91; 
other nationalities, 57-58; as- 
similation of, 58-59, 61, 68-69; 
restrictions to, 60, 71-72; Euro- 
pean, Question of checking, 65-66, 
117; better inspecting and sifting 
of, 66; statistics of, 55, 56, 57, 58, 
59, 71; tests of education and 
property, 72. 

ImperiaUsm, Political contest over, a 
wholesome one, 238. 

Imports, National government alone 
levies taxes on, 195. 

Incorue tax advocated, 209. 

Indian characteristics impressed upon 
American personality, 41-42, 44. 

Indian famiUes and individuals. 
Distribution of lands in severalty 
to, 44. 

Indian lands, Aquirement of, 88; 
opened up to white settlers, 43- 
44. 



Indian question. Difficulties of the, 
41-45 ; gradually overcome, 68. 

Indian Territory, Creation of, 43. 

Indiana, Blending of settlers in, 38; 
conditions for settlement of, pre- 
scribed in Ordinance of 1787, 38- 
39; growth of, 53; free farming 
in, 90. 

Indians, French missionaries to, 
superb pioneers, 32; good faith 
pledged to the, in Ordinance of 
1787, 40; admitted to citizenship 
in Mexico, 42; will enter into full 
American citizenship, 44 ; race 
absorption will dispose of, 45. 

Individual Uberties enhanced by 
governmental authority, 11, 166- 
167. 

Individual hberty a dominant doc- 
trine, 5, 19, 166-167, 223. 

Individualism, Growth of the abstract 
doctrine of, 5. 

Industrial monopoly. Checking of, 
176, 190. 

Industrial movement. The modem, 
and the new poHtical activity, 18. 

Initiative and referendum, 152. 

Intelligence, Diffusion of, in Ameri- 
can revolutionary period, 34. 

Interests hostile to the railroads, 
178-179. 

Internal revenue tax, 209. 

International law, A time for prog- 
ress in, 251. 

Interstate Conunerce Commission 
created, 171 ; power of, increased, 
181, 189. 

Interstate Commerce Law of 1887 
passed, 171, 176. 

Ireland, Government of, a perplex- 
ing question to British states- 
men, 8. 

Irish-Americans, Young, ignorant of 
Irish politics of the day, 68; a 
fading distinction, 69. 

Irish and German stock engaged in 
Americanizing foreigners, 68-69. 

Irish immigration after Irish famine, 
55-56, 68, 91. 

Iron-masters, A few, specially fa- 
vored by railroads, 173-174. 



260 



INDEX 



Irrigation conventions, Trans-Mis- 
sissippi, 104. 

Irrigation, Possibilities of, 103, 107. 

Irrigation rights, Water for, will be 
sold by the government, 114. 

Irrigation works. Governmental, 105 ; 
cost of, 107. 

Isolation, Our, a factor of our po- 
litical stability, 22. 

Isthmian Canal, An, 240-243 ; French 
project for, across Isthmus of 
Panama, 241 ; Americans for 
Nicaragua route, 241 ; abandoned 
and French rights at Panama 
bought by United States, 242-243 ; 
required, 242 ; effect of completion 
of, 243; will benefit all nations, 
246. 

Italy, Surplus population of, has 
emigrated, 57. 

Italy, United, as a nationality, 249. 

Jackson, Andrew, hero of New Or- 
leans, 227. 

Japan promoting economic progress, 
206 ; as a nationality, 249 ; our 
mission to, 249 ; understands our 
Asiatic policy, 250. 

Japanese government utilizing the 
migratory energy of its people, 
64. 

Japanese immigration checked, 64. 

Jefferson, Thomas, a thinker in 
generalities, 4, 226. 

John, King, Days of, repeated in 
Russia, 9. 

Johnson, Andrew, Attempt to im- 
peach, 234. 

Kansas, Destiny of, in doubt, 90; 

rapid settlement of, 100. 
Kentucky Resolutions, Excellent ar- 

gtiments for and against the, 25. 
Know-nothingism, 56, 62. 
Korea, Our relations with, 249. 

Labor, foreign. Utilization of all 
classes of, 72-73. 

Labor, Government efforts to im- 
prove condition of, 122. 

Labor-unions, Federations of, 186. 



Laborers, European, sold in open 
markets in Northern ports, 80. 

Laborers, Indentured, in Virginia, 46. 

Land system. Complete revision of, 
necessary, 108 ; old-time, reversed, 
109; recent policies, 118. 

Landlordism and collectivism in 
management of public domain, 114. 

Lands, Public, donated for school 
puriDoses, 76 ; cost to the govern- 
ment of the, 87-88; virtually free 
to settlers, 89; price per acre, 89, 
92 ; given to promote transporta- 
tion enterprises, 92, 93 ; South 
opposed to giving, 93. 

Lands, The new, sold to small far- 
mers, 35. 

Language, The bond of, 8, 66. 

Languages, Diverse, a disturbing 
element, 9. 

Latin-American republics, Our re- 
lation to the, 226. 

Lesseps, M. de, and the Panama 
Canal project, 241-242. 

Lewis and Clark Expedition, 231. 

Lincoln, Abraham, and the spread 
of slavery, 50-51 ; assassination 
of, and what it cost us in states- 
manship, 229-230. 

Literacy, The test of, 65. 

Lobbies and bribing, 147. 

Lords, House of, must disappear, 9. 

Louisiana Purchase, The, 27, 33, 53, 
90, 227, 231. 

Machine, The party, and its manipu- 
lation, 147-149, 154; power of, 
breaking down, 151 ; means of de- 
feating, 153. 

Machine politics, Reaction against, 
149-150; worst evils of, in great 
cities, 156. 

Machinery of government, Views 
of, 12; smooth running, 15; chief 
concern of citizenship, 30. 

Machinery of politics, official, 126. 

Machines, political. Venal alliance 
of, with private interests, 160. 

McKinley-Bryan silver fight, 220. 

McKinley tariff of 1890 and reci- 
procity, 203. 



INDEX 



261 



Madison, James, available for con- 
sultation, 226. 

Magnate, The railroad, 177. 

Maine, Sir Henry, Historico-political 
notions of, 4. 

Man, The, more important than the 
dollar, 186. 

Manhood suffrage. Long fight for, in 
European countries, 18-19. 

Manual labor, im.skilied, Supply of, 
60. 

Manufacturers, English, dominated 
the markets of the world, 197. 

Manufacturing growth, Our first, 
aided by a tariff, 195-196. 

Massachusetts, Exclusion of illiter- 
ates in, represents fastidiousness, 
125. 

Maximilian and Mexico, 229. 

Merchant Marine, Disappearance of, 
explained, 206. 

Mexicanizing, Danger from, 158. 

Mexico, England, France, and Spain, 
united to intervene in, 228 ; Maxi- 
milian placed in power by Napo- 
leon III, 229. 

Mexico, Spanish influence in, 31-32 ; 
Indian racial type in, 42-43 ; 
racial conditions in, 44-45; War 
with, 90, 225. 

Michigan, Conditions for settlement 
of, prescribed in Ordinance of 
1787, 38-39. 

Middle States, Settlers from the, in 
Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, 38, 54. 

Migrations, European, in periods, 71 . 

Migratory spirit. The, in this coun- 
try, 57, 62. 

Mineral lands. Government reserva- 
tion of, 112-113; shoiild have 
been retained, 114, 184; recent 
policies concerning, 118; future 
development of, 185. 

Mississippi, English jurisdiction ex- 
tended to the, 32 ; and beyond, 33. 

Mississippi River, New communities 
west of the, 53, 91 ; Territory 
drained by the, property of Spain, 
31,224. 

Mississippi Territory organized under 
the principles of the Ordinance of 



1787, 39; Indians in the, provided 
for, 43. 

Mississippi Valley, Rapid settlement 
of the, after the war, 95. 

Missouri should have been a free 
state, 38. 

MobiUty, social and political. Preser- 
vation of, 45-46, 60-61 ; 118-119, 
122. 

Monetary system could be improved, 
221. 

Money and currency. Problems of, 
210-223; as popular issues, 98- 
100; 194. 

Money function of government, 222. 

Money to supply government needs, 
Method of raising, 208-209. 

Mongolian influx, A, tolerable, 86. 

Monopolies and combinations Mr. 
Bryan would destroy, 183, 192. 

Monopolies, Government regulation 
of, confined within narrow limits, 
188, 194. 

Monopoly privileges, Unprecedented, 
granted by railroads, 174-175; 
trusts and corporations have given 
up, 182. 

Monroe Doctrine, 225-226; a con- 
crete lesson in the, 229 ; expanded 
to fit the Western hemisphere, 235- 
236; asserted, 244, 249. 

Morals, Improvement in political 
and business, 165. 

Morrill tariff of 1861, largely pro- 
tectionist, 196. 

Municipal elections held at a sepa- 
rate time, 150, 160-161. 

Municipal Voters' League of Chicago 
and its work for Illinois, 155-156. 

Napoleonic epoch, Instabihty of 
European sovereignties in the, 26. 

Nation-building, Conditions to be 
guarded against in, 118-119. 

National Civil Service Reform Asso- 
ciation, 143. 

National expansion. Acquisition of 
territory for, the object of states- 
manship, 231 ; our one great op-r 
portmiity for, indefinitely post- 
poned, 234. 



262 



INDEX 



National progress, Government a 
positive force for, 142. 

National tmity the transcendent 
problem, 24-29, 116, 227, 249. 

Nationalism, Present arbitrary and 
narrow conception of, 20; ideals 
of, 249. 

Nationalism and sectionalism growing 
side by side, 227. 

Nationalist and federalist. Duty of, 26. 

Nationality, A new composite, 86; 
creating a great, 114. 

Nebraska, Rapid settlement of, 100. 

Negro, The, accorded ample eco- 
nomic opportunities, 66-67; sub- 
jected to severe competition with 
white labor, 67. 

Negro illiterates. Exclusion of, in the 
South, 124-125. 

Negro population. Percentage of, 
decreasing, 84-85. 

Negro question. The, 45-53; Euro- 
pean immigration the ultimate 
solution of the, 67; political 
problems arising from, 117. 

Negroes and slavery elements of 
political controversy, 24, 40. 

Negroes, Results of enfranchisement 
of, 77-78; as citizens North and 
South, 81-82 ; schools for, 82-83 ; 
disfranchisement of illiterates, 25 ; 
acquisition of the franchise by the, 
abnormal, 125 ; restoration of, will 
depend on their merits, 126. 

New England conscience. The, 51-52. 

New England protected slave trade 
and plotted secession, 24, 227; 
settlers from, in Ohio, Indiana, and 
Illinois, 38, 54. 

New England town meeting, 35. 

New Orleans, Battle of, 227. 

New York City, Fairly honest voting 
and counting in, 160. 

New York State doubtful in presi- 
dential years, 157-158. 

New Zealand, Economic tendencies 
in, 10. 

Newfoundland, Our fishing rights off 
coasts of, 227. 

Newlands, Senator, of Nevada, and 
the Reclamation Act, 104. 



Newspapers, country, subsidized, 148. 

Newspapers in foreign languages un- 
read by the second generation, 74. 

Nicaragua ship canal, 168. See 
Isthmian Canal. 

North Carolina cedes territory now 
Tennessee to the Union, 39. 

Northern Pacific Railroad, Land 
grants to, 94-95. 

Northern prejudice played upon, 134. 

Northern statesmen tolerated con- 
tinuance of slave trade, 25. 

Northwest boundary. How sectional 
animosities affected settlement of 
the, 228. 

Northwestern territory. Cession of 
the, by Virginia and other colo- 
nies, 27. 

Office-holding class. We must have 
no permanent, 141. 

Office, rotation in, 141. 

Office-seeking, The evils of, 141. 

OSicials, Number of government, 127. 

Ohio, Blending of settlers in, 38; 
conditions for settlement of, pre- 
scribed in Ordinance of 1787, 38- 
39 ; growth of, 53 ; free farming 
in, 90. 

Oil, coal, and mineral privileges. Leas- 
ing of by government, 112, 114; 
should have been retained, 184. 

Oil-company, One, favored by rail- 
roads, 174. 

Oklahoma admitted as a state, 44. 

Opportunities in American poHtical 
life. Stimulating effect of, 129-130 ; 
lacking in European public hfe, 
129. 

Ordinance of 1787, Some provisions 
of the, 38-40. 

Oregon, Amending constitution in, 
153. 

Oregon coimtry. Title to, confirmed, 
91 ; dispute over the, 227 ; settled 
by diplomacy, 228; Lewis and 
Clark Expedition to the, 231. 

Pacific coast country. Isolation of 
the, 92-93; development of, Chi- 
nese labor in, 62. 



INDEX 



263 



Panama, Our relation to, and world 
politics, 20; Republic of, estab- 
lished, 243 ; our virtual seizure of, 
250. 

Panama Canal and a revival of 
American merchant shipping, 207. 

Panama ship canal, 168. See also 
Isthmian Canal. 

Panic of 1873, 215, 216. 

Panics of 1837 and 1857, 93. 

Parity on a gold basis now easily 
maintained, 221. 

Parhamentary training afforded by 
political meetings, 129-130. 

Parties, American political. The 
working of, 126-144; opportuni- 
ties in non-official organizations, 
130-131 ; two traditional organiza- 
tions, 132 ; Repubhcan and Demo- 
cratic, 133-134 ; Prohibition and 
Greenback, 135 ; the two domina- 
ting, institutional and organic, 136 ; 
keep their national character, 137 ; 
organized according to pohtical 
di^asions, 138 ; stengthened by or- 
ganization, 139-140; the "bolt" a 
party corrective, 140; office-hold- 
ing and office-seeking in, 141-142 ; 
the boss and corporate interests, 
145-151 ; influence of, in official 
affairs, 152; corruption in, 156- 
161; purification of, 161-164; will 
continue institutional, 165. 

Parties, The minor, have value as 
protests against machine politics, 
156-157. 

Party divisions in local elections, 
141. 

Party machinery, Further problems 
of, 145. 

Party newspaper, The, maintains its 
freedom, 162. 

Party opinion expounded by presi- 
dential nominee, 137. 

Party pohtical life associated with 
the structure of government, 138. 

Party soUdarity, 141. 

Party system. The growth of the, 
130-132 ; must be truly demo- 
cratic, 153; subjection to, fol- 
lowed by revolt, 155. 



Peace, domestic, a safeguard against 

foreign war, 225; never stronger 

than now, 250. 
Pensions, A vast outlay for, equalizes 

conditions, 208. 
People's welfare. The, the concern 

of the state, 16, 166. 
Periodical press, the, of national 

circulation, Power of, 163. 
Philadelphia, Correction of voting 

system in, 154-155. 
Philippines, Our relations to the, 

and world politics, 20 ; our tariff 

relations with the, 202 ; capture 

and acquisition of the, 238-239; 

our policy toward, 239 ; its results, 

239-240. 
Platforms, Party, 137. 
Political agitation, Periods of, 15. 
Political animals, Americans, 131. 
Political contributions. Prohibition 

of, by private corporations, 151. 
Political controversy, 116, 119, 120. 
Political controversy over economic 

questions. Result of, 223. 
Pohtical corruption, 157, 159, 189. 
Pohtical expenditure, pubhcity for, 

151. 
Political issues of the immediate fu- 
ture, 192-193. 
Political life and operation of gov- 
ernment, 149. 
Political hfe, Efforts to keep our 

internal, sane, 249. 
Political machinery, official and 

voluntary, 126-128 ; popularly 

worked, unknown in England, 129 ; 

management of, a business, 138— 

139. 
Pohtical organization. Voluntary, 

apart from pohtical parties, 143. 
Political power. Absolutism of, 6. 
Political power and energy. Notions 

of, how arrived at, 4-6. 
Political units. Training had in our 

smaller, 127-128. 
Politicians, Professional, for personal 

gain, 139, 165. 
Politics, honest and pubUc-spirited, 

Power of, 151. 
Politics, Philosophical study of, 



264 



INDEX 



necessary, 3 ; a great national 
game, 16, 127, 131 ; the voluntary 
organization of, always in contact 
with the official business of gov- 
ernment, 137 ; business of, ab- 
sorbed by professional politicians, 
160; divisive and sectional char- 
acter of our, 225, 227 ; dominant, 
at Washington, after Lincoln's 
death, 234. 

"Pooling " of railroad rates, 171. 

Population and citizenship, Construc- 
tive problems of, 30-61. 

Population, Problems of, 7; divi- 
sion of, 55 ; massing in cities, 65. 

Populistic movement. The, 135. 

Porto Rico included in our economic 
zone, 202; our policy toward, 
239-240. 

Post Office Department, Work of, in 
delivering periodicals, 163-164 ; a 
landmark in development of free 
democratic political life, 164. 

Prairie states. Destruction of forests 
in upbuilding the, 109-110. 

Presidential campaign our "quad- 
rennial poUtical cycle," 126. 

Presidential election, might be 
changed by a single ballot-box, 
258. 

Press, The, serves public as against 
private ends, 162 ; foremost agency 
in vmifying American life, 164. 

Primary election system, 150, 161. 

Private contracts enforced by gov- 
ernment, 222. 

Prohibition wave. The, and third 
party, 135, 201. 

Protection and free trade contro- 
versy. Doctrinaire aspects of, 
passed away, 202. 

Protective tariff blended with all 
policies for high development, 198. 

Protestant Reformation, Modern po- 
litical movement in the, 18. 

Public opinion, how built up, 124; 
an aroused, 151 ; developed, 162. 

Public policies. Question of right 
and wrong in, 23. 

PubUc policy. Views of, formulated 
by the great parties, 137 ; failures 



of, in certain lines, 184-185 ; new 
lines evolved, 190-191. 

Public schools, our essential institu- 
tion, 61 ; burden of immigration 
upon our, 66; greatly increased 
responsibility resting upon our, 70 ; 
must be of the best, 74-75. 

Public schools and citizenship, 46. 

Public schools of New York and 
Chicago focuses of patriotic Ameri- 
can enthusiasm, 73. 

Quarter-section homesteads, 89, 92. 

Quebec, Battle of, 32. 

Quebec, French in the province of, 32. 

Questions of current politics, Treat- 
ment of, 2. 

Questions of public concern. More, 
should be submitted to popular 
vote, 153 ; being solved, 164. 

Race problems, Indians and negroes, 
40-53. 

Race question in the South, Prob- 
lems arising from the, 117. 

Race situation. Social difficulties of 
the Southern, 81-83. 

Racial and economic antagonisms 
to be guarded against, 118. 

Railroad control by government, 176, 
178; must be beneficial, 181. 

Railroad interests powerful in po- 
Utical life, 179. 

Railroad lines in private hands, 169. 

Railroad officials, blunted moral per- 
ception of, 172-173. 

Railroad rates. Power to regulate, 
not abused, 170 ; discrimination in, 
forbidden, 171 ; rebates and eva- 
sions, 172-175. 

Railroad regulation, National, se- 
cured, 171-172. 

Railroad systems. Attempt to break 
up large, 177. 

Railroad transportation. Certain 
forms of agreement desirable in, 
189. 

Railroads, Canals and, projected 
on paper, 92-93; became colo- 
nizers and immigration agents on 
a great scale, 95 ; a necessity, 96 ; 



INDEX 



265 



reasons for government ownership 
of, in European countries, 167- 
168 ; arguments for, in this 
country, 168 ; insatiate demand 
for, 169 ; eager for business, 169 ; 
war against special rates, 169- 
170; government's right to fix 
rates upheld, 170; as common 
carriers, 170 ; create a "community 
of interest," 177; interests hostile 
to, 178-179 ; function of govern- 
ment in relation to, 178 ; acquisi- 
tion, laissez faire, or supervision, 
180-181 ; public regulation of, 
difficult, 181 ; national charters 
to interstate, and national con- 
trol of stock and bond issues, 181 ; 
raaking rates, 188-189 ; govern- 
ment operation of, proposed, 190 ; 
government regulation of, confined 
within narrow limits, 188, 194; 
advocated by William J. Bxyan, 
192 ; result of, 193. 

Railroads, transcontinental, Public 
credit and lands granted to, 94-95, 
168. 

Railways and trusts, control of, 166- 
193. 

Rainfall, areas of doubtful. Farming 
in, 102. 

Rate-cutting, 171. 

Rates, The making of, 188-189. 

Rates, see Railroad rates. 

Rebates and discriminations, 172- 
175. 

Rebates and evasions, 172-175; en- 
deavor to abolish, 181. 

Reclamation Act of 1902, 104-106. 

Reclamation Fund, 106, 107. 

Reclamation service, 185. 

Reclamation under Geological Sur- 
vey, 107, 185. 

Reconstruction on a false basis, 234. 

Reconstruction period, Dangerous 
tension through the, 117-118. 

Referendum, The, 152. 

Reform, Political, movements, 161- 
162. 

Reformers in politics must succeed, 
154; have made enormous prog- 
ress, 160. 



Reforms, Great, effected through 
ripening of conditions, 182. 

Renaissance, Modern political move- 
ment in the, 18. 

Representation, Southern, no re- 
duction of, likely, 82. 

Republican party, The, 133-136; 
identified with the cause of the 
Union, 134; enfranchised the 
slaves, 134. 

Revolutionary soldiers, Land grants 
to, taken up, 53. 

Revolutionary War, The, 22. 

Revolutionary War debts of the 
colonies assumed by the govern- 
ment, 87. 

Rhode Island, Reform of represen- 
tation in, almost impossible, 17. 

River and harbor improvements 
profitable to commerce, 208. 

Roosevelt, President, on the rec- 
lamation of the arid lands, 104- 
105 ; nomination of, drew back 
Western Republicans, 136 ; recent 
messages of, 189; requirements 
of his policy, 190-191 ; reelection 
of, in 1904, the greatest personal 
triumph in history of American 
politics, 204. 

Rousseau a thinker in generalities, 4. 

Russia and constitutional liberties, 
23 ; immigrants from, 58 ; like 
England in the days of King John, 
9 ; diplomatic dispute with, 227 ; 
as a nationality, 249. 

St. Lawrence River, Territory con- 
tiguous to, the property of France, 
31 ; the Northeast concerned 
about, 227. 

St. Patrick's Day in America, 68. 

San Domingo, Our relations to, and 
world politics, 20; our policy 
toward, 243-244; treaty with, 
ratified, 244. 

Scandinavians in the Northwest, 57 ; 
becoming fully American, 69; 
became Republicans, 133. 

Schools, Lands designated for sup- 
port of, 35 ; encouraged by Or- 
dinance of 1787, 38; must per- 



266 



INDEX 



petuate American ideals and tra- 
ditions, 75-76 ; deartti of common, 
in the South, 76-77. 

Scotch-Irish immigrants to the Mid- 
dle States, 54. 

Secessionist movement. The first, at 
Hartford Convention, 227. 

Sectional and race questions inten- 
sified by party management, 77-78, 
134-135. 

Sectional animosities, Accumulation 
of, 228 ; after the wsLt, 230 ; their 
cost to us, 232-233; effaced by 
war with Spain, 242. 

Sectional feeling. Vast change in, 
119. 

Sectionalism and nationalism, 227, 
228, 232. 

Seminoles removed to Indian Ter- 
ritory, 43. 

Senate, United States, Undue in- 
fluence of cow-boy states in the, 
106-107. 

Senators, United States, Election of, 
by the people, 152; preliminary 
selection of, by the people. 161. 

Separation and revolution, Deep- 
lying causes of, 23-24. 

Settlement of Western territory. 
Rapid, 37-38, 90. 

Settlers, American, character of, 21. 

Seward, WilUam H., and Maximilian's 
empire in Mexico, 228-229; pwc- 
chase of Alaska, 230. . 

Sherman Anti-Trust Law, 176 ; ef- 
fect of enforcement, 176-177 ; 
administration of the, 189-190. 

Sherman Resiunption Act passed in 
1875, 213, 216. 

Silver craze in the South and West, 
218. 

Silver demonetized in 1873, 214; 
large output of, and mints closed 
to, 214-215 ; dechne in value of, 
216-218; coinage of, suspended 
in France and by Latin Monetary 
Union, 217 ; government a monthly 
purchaser of, and notes issued, 218- 
219 ; purchase stopped by a special 
session of Congress, 219. 

Silver, Friends of, in a frenzy, 201. 



Slave-holding power of the South 
controlled the tariff, 197-198. 

Slave-trade, Foreign, abolished, 48; 
New England protected the, 24, 
227 ; the prohibition of the, a re- 
striction upon immigration, 79; 
precursor of the Chinese Exclu- 
sion Act, 79 ; of incalculable sig- 
nificance, 80. 

Slavery an ever-increasing danger 
to unity, 24-25; forbidden by 
Ordinance of 1787, 38 ; north and 
south of the Ohio, 40; immense 
expansion of, 47-49; created 
differences, 50; and sectional 
antagonisms, 197. 

Slaves, Demand for more, 80 ; num- 
ber of, 80-81. 

Social conditions, Reqviirements of, 
changing, 7. 

Sociologist, How the, defines po- 
Htical life, 4. 

Sound money election of 1896, 219- 
220. 

South, Claims of, for different foreign 
and domestic poHcies, 50; the 
intense sentiment of the, 51-52; 
white supremacy asserted in, 77— 
78; must attract foreign and 
Northern immigrants, 83, 85; 
white population of, to grow more 
rapidly than the negro, 84 ; a more 
stable political condition in the, 
125 ; the solid, held by Democratic 
poUticians, 134; changing its in- 
dustrial character, 200 ; friendly to 
England through cotton trade, 
228. 

South America, Direct trade with, 
should be in ships of American 
register, 207. 

South American republics entering 
upon economic development, 206. 

Southern farming, National poUcy 
toward, 83. 

Southern Pacific Railroad, Land 
grants to, 94-95. 

Southern states, Demand for Euro- 
pean labor in the, 66 ; immigra- 
tion to the, the solution of the 
negro question, 67. 



INDEX 



267 



Southern statesmen hoped for a 
retreat from the slave system, 25 ; 
opposed free homestead legislation, 
90-91. 

Southwest, The, and our relations 
with Spain and Mexico, 227. 

Sovereignty, Theory of, from inter- 
national standpoint, 19-20 ; minor 
and major state, 20; our, 22, 29. 

Spain and the Cuban revolution, 236- 
237; our intervention and war 
with Spain, 237-238, 242 ; domes- 
tic harmony after our war with, 
242; our inestimable service to, 
recognized, 250. 

Spaniards in Mexico, 31-32, 43. 

Spanish colonization. Extent and 
results of, 30-32, 224. 

Spanish-American repubUcs estab- 
Mshed, 226. 

Speculation inevitable in settlement 
of a new country, 93. 

Spoils, To the victor belong the, 
141. 

Spoils system no longer dominant, 
144; corrected, 153-154. 

Standard Oil Company investigation, 
176. 

Standpoints, Two, for survey of 
poUtical life of a nation, 1-2. 

State laws and customs, voluntary 
uniformity in, 29. 

State, Metaphysics of the, 3-5 ; the 
foremost fact in the political 
structure, 6; functions of the, 
13-14; supremacy and stability 
of the, 13, 14, 166; the people 
make the, 16 ; a composite entity, 
17; elements of the, 22; constitu- 
tional provision for admission of, 
28. 

States' rights and national sover- 
eignty, Argiunents about, his- 
torical curiosities, 28. 

Statesmanship, Aims of, 14-15, 36, 
39, 74, 248, 250; of compromise, 
227; failure of, on death of Lin- 
coln, 229-230. 

Suffrage, National universal, 122, 124. 

Switzerland, Economic tendencies in, 
10. 



Tariff, The broadly protective, of 
1816, 196; the compromise, of 
1833, 196 ; a double, adopted by 
several European countries, 204- 
205. 

Tariff discussion, Acute, 135, 194, 
200. 

Tariff issue. Intensity of, lessened 
with growth of Western and 
Southern manufactures, 199-200. 

Tariff question, The, in our political 
history, 194-206. 

Tariff rates comparatively low in 
1842, 196 ; difficulties in adjusting, 
198-199. 

Tariff, Revision of, more favored by 
Eastern and Iowa Repubhcana 
than by any section of Democrats, 
204. 

Tariffs, protective. Southern attitude 
against, 25, 196-198; Northern 
economic tendencies for, 25. 

Taxation, Problems of, 208-209, 212. 

Taxes, Other equalizing, as allowable 
as tariff discriminations, 209. 

Telegraph and telephone monopo- 
listic and also pubhc services, 188, 

Temperament of the American peo- 
ple, 201. 

Territorial governments a prepara- 
tion for statehood, 35-36. 

Texas belonged to Spain, 31 ; re- 
tained by Mexico, 33 ; annexation 
of, 90; admitted with slavery 
already existing, 38; acquisition 
of, led to purchase of California, 
228. 

Timber Culture Act passed, 110; 
failure and repeal of. 111. 

Timber, Standing, will be sold by 
government, 114; areas of, shoiild 
have been held as pubhc property, 
184. 

Town meeting. The New England, 35. 

Township, The six-mile-square, the 
unit of land measurement, 89. 

Trade, Triangular movement of, 
advantageous to us, 207. 

Transportation, Public interest 
greater than private in business 
of, 177; pubhc character of, 186- 



268 



INDEX 



187; a great industry tending to 
harmony, 188. 

Treasury, Secretary of the, Problems 
presented to the, 99. 

Tree planting on prairie farms, 110. 

Tribune, New York Weekly, and 
Horace Greeley, 163. 

Trusts and combinations created by 
railway discrimination, 175-176; 
exist in Germany without, 187 ; 
outside of quasi-public corpora- 
tions, not all bad, 191. 

Trusts, Iron and oil, favored in rates 
of shipment, 173-175. 

Trusts, Some, occupy the entire field, 
183 ; government should super- 
vise these, 183. 

Union, The chief steps toward, 27. 

Union Pacific Railroad subsidy, 94. 

United States, Responsibility of, 
among the nations, 249-251 ; cor- 
dial foreign relations of, 250. 

Utah, Church and state in, 17. 

Venezuela, Our policy toward, 244; 
arbitration with England on British 
Guiana boundary, 244 ; a European 
raid upon, ended, 245. 

Virginia cedes territory now Ken- 
tucky to the Union, 39 ; settlers 
from, in Ohio, Indiana, and Illi- 
nois, 38; in Tennessee, Alabama, 
Missouri, and Arkansas, 54. 

Virginia Resolutions, argiunents for 
and against the, 25. 

Voters register the social will, 123; 
ratio of, to office-holders, 128. 

Voting system. Devices for protect- 
ing, of use, 154. 

War debts. Revolutionary, of the 
colonies assumed by the govern- 
ment, 87. 

War of 1812 interrupted our foreign 
trade, 196. 

Washington, Treaty of, 232. 



Washington's Farewell Address, 225. 

Water, Laws and regulations con- 
cerning, in Western states, 103. 

Water povv^er for electrical trans- 
mission will be sold by government, 
114. 

Water-supply the chief asset in arid 
and semi-arid belt, 102 ; permanent 
public protection of chief sources 
of, 104, 109. 

Webster, Daniel, logic of, 25. 

Webster and Clay favored time and 
compromises in political contro- 
versy, 25 ; national leaders, 227. 

West, The great, Spanish territory, 
31 ; opening of the, 56 ; Adctim of its 
own overproduction, 97-98, 101. 

West Indies, Results of our nearness 
to, 47-48 ; plantation methods of, 
adopted, 48. 

Western Granger movement, 135. 

Westward movement. The, after the 
Revolution, 35 ; intensified Ameri- 
can traits and institutions, 36, 53, 
92-96. 

Whigs, The, 133. 

Whites, The poorer, drifting to the 
moimtains, 48-49 ; of the South, 
its most valuable possession, 84; 
economic upbuilding of, necessary, 
85, 119. 

Wild-cat currency, 210-211. 

Wilson tariff of 1894 and free raw 
materials, 203. 

Wisconsin, Conditions for settlement 
of, prescribed in Ordinance of 
1787, 39. 

Woman suffrage in Colorado and 
other Western states, 124. 

Women, Social, economic, and po- 
litical status of, improved, 122- 
124 ; safeguards for, in Massachu- 
setts, 125. 

World conferences and tribunals, 
Influence and authority of, 251. 

World harmony, A new period of, 
20. 

C. A. N. 



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